Hi everyone

[Lolaloveloki]

Hi Fletch!! Welcome to CK! I hope you will like it here
You will like our community, I'm sure of it!

See you around

[Aglett]

Welcome to ck

[xmilo]

Hi Fletch! Definitely interested to see what you can do with mystery pic since they have changed the way they make the images.

Welcome back to programming for neopets!

[valseedian2]

just looked into the new mystery pic..
what the hell is that abomination...??
definitely can't tackle it like I did last time anymore. I'm not even sure I could figure out a good way other than a confidence rating system on a gradient demapper..
the last time it relied on pre-parsing every single image into a database containing file references. each file coresponded to a 4 pixel square and every 4 pixel square was mapped for every image. Grab the mystery pic, get a list of all the files containing all the squares and then sort down to the one(or few) that contain the most squares from the pic.
the old mystery pic generator always turned 1 pixel into a 10x10 square, so you could always count on the corners of those squares being 1:1 represented in some image somewhere.

IDK, it could still work that way.. but I'd need a lot of resources to do any real testing. I'd at least want the actual pic that each of the last 10-100 pics correspond to so I can find a good confidence system. if I only have 100 pics to parse and the answer is guaranteed to be in the list for my sample set I could possibly get a system working before having to spend the time getting all the images.
last time the database contained 131,000 individual pictures and totaled 40ish gb. the post parse database was over 100gb.
the last time I did this system, it took me like 6 months between coding the spider to gather images, the system to remove real pictures, the system to database and rename all the images, the system to pre-parse the database, and the system to read the pic and search the database... to actually running those programs... the spider took nearly a month, and the parser was another 2-3 weeks
after all that I realized I'd forgotten to record the original page the image was found on into the post-parse database after renaming the images, so I could only publish the picture(neopets image url) I thought it came from and no other good info.

I'd always assumed they were doing some manipulation that made the mysterypic not 1:1 from some image, so I wrote a system to handle that. Now I can be 100% sure they are doing that type of manipulation.

sorry to post so many text walls lol. I'm sorta just keeping notes for myself.
if anyone has a list of the last mystery pic images, I'd pay to get my hands on it.

[♥ PrettySarcastic ♥]

Welcome to CK, Fletch.

We have folks who do some pondering on Mystery Pic, but a full repository of past Mystery Pic images could probably be found on JellyNeo or somewhere? I'm not super familiar.

I'm sure that bygones will be bygones, just keep proving yourself a cool and contributing member of the community and I think any awkwardness will fade.

(My wife is a HUGE minesweeper fan from way back, I could never get into it.)

[TsUNaMy WaVe]

Welcome to ck, Fletch!
Tbh just from reading your messages here I'm pretty excited to see what programs you'll make. If you can detail about the general making and how was it, it'll be even better! (I'm an amateur programmer myself)

[Hall]

Welcome to the site, it seems like you're already ready to tackle the Mystery Pic challenge! I look forward to your progress. :3

[Menine]

Welcome to ck! I'm glad you're still making programs and willing to contribute for the community! Hope to see you around!

[valseedian2]

I posted about being open source with a link to a zip containing all my current sources, but it's stuck in Mod limbo due to the link I'm sure.

I'll be back later tonight to post in the programming forum about the minesweeper project and some sample code.. if anyone wants to know the intricacies of extremely low level screen buffer access and input event queue manipulation this will give you some insight on what I've learned. and access to a few helper class headers that make hyper-speed screen scraping and displaying the result trivial.

if anyone wants full copies of everything I'm working on, You can direct message me. this week's fun is all about learning new things. I'm a linear c++ programmer at heart, and I do low level data management and up-to-meta level parsing. That said I haven't done much with graphics that wasn't the mystery pic or the minesweeper project. recently I turned the screen handler class into a more general buffer handling class which could load, dertermine and write sprites from a sprite map, but it is devastatingly slow because it renders everything on the cpu. That whole story just to say I've been working on learning the directx, opengl, GLUT and CUDA frameworks
being c++, and having tons of controll over the inet wrapper (I wrote it), I am almost 100% sure I could do a CUDA enhanced AB which wouldn't have to write the image file to disk at all to parse it.
with a multigrid multiblock binary reducing search sort you go from doing ~3000 value checks linearly (at best) to like 8 linear checks.

[Blue-tooth]

thinking about a big project.. maybe the usershop database, maybe the mystery pic solver(if that still exists)... done both before, can do them again.

Hi Fletch and welcome to the community!
Mystery pic solver is fine.
I'm happy to have a new programmer with us.