Monday, October 8, 2007

IIT Shaastra 2007 :)

(note:all links open in a new window)
Hello people :D

Here I am, went to participate in India's biggest tech fest 'IIT Shaastra' conducted by the IIT Madras. Ok what am I doing over there. Well, me and my another friend built a pick-and-place robot which had a nonsense Stepper motor interface problem which didn't make it work but wait did I tell you I came to know about the competetion only about 25 days before the event and we had internals and we didn't work on the robo for a week. So in approximately 15 we built the following beauty, right from the scratch..




We just had 3 days before the Shaastra started to implement what we had planned in our brains. The main deal was the mechanical thing. I thank God that my friend has a few contacts with a few industry people we were able to build the chassis in a given short time. We used to stay in the factory for more than 13 hours each day. It was wonderful experience getting hands on experience to the tools which we used to draw in the Mechanical Workshop Journal books.

I said 'theek hai yaar! wahan pe dekhenge kya hoga. If the circuit works fine else it is still fine'...


After all the fuss of canceling and reserving the train tickets which I don't want to talk to talk about, we reached Chennai :) .. When I stepped out of the train I felt as if I was thrown into an oven. I was sweating as if a 5th standard kid was sent to the principal for sticking the chewing gum on the teacher's chair and she sat on it :/ . I thank God that my another partner for the competetion, John Avisnash is a Tamilian. I just know a few words in Tamil...like

  • Tamil teri (a)maa (Do you understand tamil?)
  • Tambi (Small Brother)
  • Annai (Big Brother)
  • Kaadal (Love)
  • Teri yaada (Understand)(Don't mistake it with teri yaad :P )
and the common Tamil songs which the students keep playing in the hostel...
Come outta the station and you get flocked by these autowalas like millions of Sperms get attracted towards an embryo (ok ok a very bakwaas example I know.. I know)

I insisted John that we take the locals but he never listens to me. He said "8'O clock is the peak hour". I said "Duh!, Peak at 8". Peak is normally between 9 and 10. Ok, we agreed that we will hire an auto. John spoke to an autowala in Tamil and started the conversation. I wasn't able to understand a sentence except if any sentences contained the above words and John was recursively using the annai word at the end of each sentence :P. We fixed a deal Rs.120 to IIT Madras....

A few things you notice in Madras
  • Clean roads
  • Dark people (note:I am 10% Tamilian)
  • Freaking Humidity
  • 10 FM stations playing a Tamil song at any given time
  • Biryani stalls (I don't eat dead animals )
After a 45 mins drive and getting heady by the Tamil songs played in the Auto (FM) we reach IIT Madras. I was happy that I reached IIT....an IIT... IIT means a lot to me....

After asking around people for the 'Mahanadi Hostel' and searching it like a wild dog...we reached the hostel with our heavy luggage and 4.6 kilo Robot... We landed in the accommodation
registration office and were greeted by a few IITians. They were soft spoken guys different from the typical IITians who are very very very arrogant. We were given the Shaastra ID cards, the mess ticket (John lost his within 3 hrs) the room no. and the hostel we were alloted.

A few hostel shots..

John and me (not in pic) in the final stages of getting the circuit work, but a stupid interfacing prob :(


IIT hostel corridor, 7 floors high X 20 buildings


Top view :P







The Stepper Motor and the DC motors Circuits

IIT Madras is adjacent to the National Guindy Park. It's lush green campus at first sight looks like a forest. Students who reside within the campus are not allowed to use vehicles which emit gases, all of 'em use bicycles..

While roaming around in the campus I spotted deers, stags and creatures which belong to the same family....here is a snap


A deer running across from the dense set of trees to the road and the green grass then back to the woods :)

The Food mess present in the IIT Campus is called "Himalaya". Why Himalaya because it's huge. Three floors high divided into 6 blocks. Each block can accommodate a min. of 120 people.

A pic inside the mess..


The centre of attraction was the hospidesk where stalls were put up to attract students. There were only a few of them like GE, G00gle, Siemens, Bosch etc.. Google came up to recruit people, so did Bosch and Siemens..

The Bosch Auditorium attracted helluva people. They had put up all the things they manufacture from fuel injectors, engines, engine parts, cutting & drilling tools, car simulators.....

A Mercedes Benz car simulator

Bosch fuel-injectors
Internals of an Engine at the Bosch Auditorium

Now, to the main part, the workshops and the seminars....

One of the major lecture I was looking forward to was Narendra Karmarkar, an inventor, has 6 patents and the famous 'Karmarkar Algorithm'. If you guys don't know who is Narendra Karmarkar.. check these links

Narendra Karmarkar as in Wiki

Karmarkar's Algorithm

Narendra Karmarkar at IIT Shaastra 2007

More images of Narendra Karmarkar from a G00gle search

So, on which topic did Narendra Karmarkar give a lecture on??
He speaks about "High Performance Computing and Advancement of Sciences".
Narendra Karmarkar works on 'Finite Projective geometry'

He spoke about
  • Henry Newman Parallelism storage method
  • P ={P1,P2,P3.....Pn} set of planes and L={L1,L2,L3...Ln} set of lines in a plane.
He creates a "Perfect Pattern table" which is nothing but the permutation of all lines.
  • He said "A complete pattern is a collection of perfect path if every index pair (a,b)"
  • A Perfect Pattern Table takes the shape of a 3D torus.
  • If m and n are 2 dependents then a 2D graph is less complex and cost effective.
Applications

Semantic search engines: Google is NOT a semantic search engine, it search is based on the keywords we type and tries matching them to the text present them in the pages using the G00gle bots. If a person doesn't know how a search engine basically works he won't be able to the search properly. Thus a Semantic search engine is a layman's search engine :)

Due to lack of time, I am unable to write more on his topic. I ll collect more information on the 'Finite Projective Geometry'. Keep watching this space....


Next lecture I was very impressed was of Dr. Apurv Patel, IIT Mumbai alumni, is a Professor in IISc Bangalore..



His topic was the most interesting one, Quantum Computing

So, what is a Quantum Computer.... A Quantum computer is one which runs on the laws of Quantum Mechanics....Well, we can't say exactly that present day computers run on Newton's Laws but they may be interconnected by the Laws of Gravitation and Ohm's law..

He spoke, "In a cartesian cordinate system complex numbers are imaginary numbers but in Quantum computing, complex numbers are real"

Quantum Mechanics is nothing but Theory of Waves.
He then spoke about something called as Qubit.
A Qubit is the simplest component of a quantum system...It can be compared to the Binary system...
A Binary system can have only 2 possible outputs, either true or false.
But a Quantum system can have multiple outputs.

I ll write more about this topic later...I need to study on this topic..
But once topic he exlained really fascinated me ...

Quantum Database Search

Due to bad light and the image is off a projector, the image is blurred one

In normal Database systems searching complexity is O(N) but in Quantum Database Search the complexity is O(N1/2)

He explained the Grover's quantum algorithm which was a bit tough to understand....have a look

The steps of Grover's algorithm are as follows:

  1. Initialize the system to the state
    |s\rang = \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}} \sum_{x=0}^{N-1} |x\rang
  2. Perform the following "Grover iteration" r(N) times. The function r(N) is described below.
    1. Apply the operator U_\omega=I-2| \omega\rangle \langle \omega|.
    2. Apply the operator U_s = 2 \left|s\right\rangle \left\langle s\right| - I.
  3. Perform the measurement Ω. The measurement result will be λω with probability approaching 1 for N>>1. From λω, ω may be obtained.

Our initial state is

|s\rang = \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}} \sum_{x=0}^{N-1} |x\rang

Consider the plane spanned by |s> and |ω>. Let |ω×> be a ket in this plane perpendicular to |ω>. Since |ω> is one of the basis vectors, the overlap is

\lang\omega|s\rang =\lang s|\omega\rang = \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}

In geometric terms, there is an angle (π/2 - θ/2) between |ω> and |s>, where θ/2 is given by:

\cos \left(\frac{\pi}{2} - \frac{\theta}{2} \right) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}
\sin \frac{\theta}{2} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}

The operator Uω is a reflection at the hyperplane orthogonal to |ω>; for vectors in the plane spanned by |s> and |ω>, it acts as a reflection at the line through |ω×>. The operator Us is a reflection at the line through |s>. Therefore, the state vector remains in the plane spanned by |s> and |ω> after each application of Us and after each application of Uω, and it is straightforward to check that the operator UsUω of each Grover iteration step rotates the state vector by an angle of θ toward |ω>.

We need to stop when the state vector passes close to |ω>; after this, subsequent iterations rotate the state vector away from |ω>, reducing the probability of obtaining the correct answer. The number of times to iterate is given by r:

r \rightarrow \frac{\pi \sqrt{N}}{4}
r \rightarrow \frac{\pi \sqrt{2^4}}{4}=\pi \approx 3.141592654

Furthermore, the probability of obtaining the wrong answer is O(1 / N), which approaches zero as N increases.

Probability to measure the correct answer is:

\sin^2( \frac{2r+1}{2} \theta) ,

where r is number (integer) of Grover iteration,

\theta = 2\arccos( \sqrt{1-\frac{1}{N}} )=2\arcsin \frac{1}{\sqrt{2^n}} .
\theta = 2\arcsin \frac{1}{\sqrt{2^4}} \approx 0.50536051.
\sin^2( \frac{2\cdot 3+1}{2} \cdot 0.50536051) =\sin^2(3.5\cdot 0.50536051) \approx 0.98046875^2\approx 0.961318969.

And probability to measure the wrong answer is:

\cos^2( \frac{2r+1}{2} \theta) .

Extensions

If, instead of 1 matching entry, there are k matching entries, the same algorithm works but the number of iterations must be π(N/k)1/2/4 instead of πN1/2/4. There are several ways to handle the case if k is unknown. For example, one could run Grover's algorithm several times, with

\pi \frac{N^{1/2}}{4}, \pi \frac{(N/2)^{1/2}}{4}, \pi \frac{(N/4)^{1/2}}{4}, \ldots

iterations. For any k, one of iterations will find a matching entry with a sufficiently high probability. The total number of iterations is at most

\pi \frac{N^{1/2}}{4} \left( 1+ \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}+\frac{1}{2}+\cdots\right)

which is still O(N1/2).



Visit his page in the IISc website here

I'll get back to this later.... :|

Then came the Advanced Materials Workshop by Dr. Sivakumar and Dr. Chandrasekar.
They explained various phenomenons of Smart materials which show different properties under different Physical constraints... like a 10mm radius titanium dioxide coin with a convex cove of 3mm in the centre when put in different temperatures was able to lift 300kg.

Dr. Chandasekar explaining with a Practical example in the auditorium
A video of the smart 'memory' material





Dr. Sivakumar gives a practical example of a smart material (a spring :| ) in this video








On the last but one day they played a movie called Sunshine
They have got a hugggggggeeee Open Air Theatre where 400+ students and other people accumulated.. The film was a sick sci-fi horror, where people land on sun (spot) and a guy exposes himself to the solar radiation in the ship and turn into a half toasted chicken....
A few pics of the same :)





We enjoyed a cup of tea near the Central railways..believe me, you can't get the taste of such a tea anywhere else in South India..a video

well, there are many other photos I have clicked..please check this link.....






There were the finals of various competetions being held on the final day.. We left IIT a bit early than expected and calculated... well, it was a very good experience.. we met people across the country.. people from other IITs, BITS Pilani, DA-IICT, RVCE all top colleges had come...I just wish that if the stepper motors had worked, we were sure that we would be in the top 3 as I saw the other models which were mechanically inferior..

The IITians are really really smart people. They adapt to any conditions and can create any situation they like. They are hard workers. They are technically superior people. They do everything, I heard a few IITians giving ma-baen gaalis,they are drug addicts, booze a lot....they know what they are doing...There is a thin line between IITians and Non-IITians.

Hard work nothing else.......

and my final words.....I hate MF Hussain due to this

Thank You....
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