In 1979, David Fabian found a complete game of two-person Chinese Checkers in 30 moves (15 by each player). This solution requires that the two players cooperate to generate a win as quickly as possible for one of them. We show, using computational search techniques, that no shorter game is possible. We also consider a solitaire version of Chinese Checkers where one player attempts to move her ...

The objective of this report is to provide a survey of relevant topics and focus on the state-of-the art techniques on hardware based rendering. Lighting models based on Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Functions were considered and algorithms and corresponding hardware implementations were reviewed.

Materials with similar chemical compositions often exhibit different optical properties due to their structural composition. PTFE is widely used in many applications for both its mechanical and optical properties. Low density sintered PTFE has optical properties that make it desirable for use as a white diffuser in applications such as remote sensing. The contrast between the commonly available...

Field and laboratory goniometers are widely used in the remote sensing community to assess spectrodirectional reflectance properties of selected targets. Even when the same target and goniometer system are used, field and laboratory results cannot directly be compared due to inherent differences, mainly in the illumination conditions: typically goniometers measure a hemispherical-conical reflec...

We describe an idea for making decomposition of Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Functions into basis functions more efficient, by performing a change-of-variables transformation on the BRDFs. In particular, we propose a reparameterization of the BRDF as a function of the halfangle (i.e. the angle halfway between the directions of incidence and reflection) and a difference angle instead o...

We argue for the creation of a curated repository of examples of bidirectional transformations (bx). In particular, such a resource may support research on bx, especially cross-fertilisation between the different communities involved. We have initiated a bx repository, which is introduced in this paper. We discuss our design decisions and their rationale, and illustrate them using the now class...

We present a novel approach to bidirectional breadth-first IDA* (BFIDA*) and demonstrate its effectiveness in the domain of peg solitaire, a simple puzzle. Our approach improves upon unidirectional BFIDA* by usually avoiding the last iteration of search entirely, greatly speeding up search. In addition, we provide a number of improvements specific to peg solitaire. We have improved duplicate-de...

It is shown that if the neuronal gains are small compared with the synaptic connection weights, then a bidirectional associative memory network with axonal signal transmission delays converges to the equilibria associated with exogenous inputs to the network. Both discrete and continuously distributed delays are considered; the asymptotic stability is global in the state space of neuronal activ...

Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTF) have proven to be a well-suited representation for the reproduction of measured real-world surface appearance and provide a high degree of realism. We present an approach for designing novel materials by interpolating between several measured BTFs. For this purpose, we transfer concepts from existing texture interpolation methods to the much more complex ca...