Assignment 13 Alternative: Plagiarism Research

A Grad student (Jesse McDonald jamcd@hawaii.edu) here at UH is researching plagiarism in intro level CS courses, specifically detecting plagiarism. As such, he needs some organic data to evaluate the method. The purpose of this assignment alternative is to generate this data. This alternative assignment is completely optional, and if you do not feel comfortable participating in this research, you do not have and can do the regular assignment 13 instead. Be sure to read the included Informed Consent document. If you have any questions, feel free to email jamcd@hawaii.edu

Plagiarism in THIS assignment

For this assignment (and this assignment only) you are NOT expect to complete the assignment alone or unaided. All regular class and university rules about Plagiarism are suspended for this assignment. You are encouraged to work together, share code, use online resources, or any other method you choose to complete this assignment (but keep it legal). Assignment submissions are completely anonymous, and can not be traced back to an individual once submitted, and the data collected will not be shared with the class instructor or class TA's until after the class grading window has closed.

Ensuring Anonymity

To ensure the above Anonymity, the assignment and IDE to do it will be distributed and collected via USB Thumbdrives. You may pickup a thumbdrive from Jesse McDonald in POST 310 Tuesday through Thursday between 1:30 and 5PM. Completed assignments can be submitted by saving them to the thumbdrive (the IDE does this by default) and returning it to 310, when you do, your name will be recorded so credit can be properly awarded. Thumbdrives will be pooled prior to being analyzed, so no identifiable information can be gathered from them. Importantly, unlike normal assignments DO NOT WRITE YOUR NAME at the top of your assignment, as this rather defeats the purpose of anonymizing the data. If you do write your name by mistake, we will purge it from the file prior to analysis and storage.

Online submission

If you don't care about the anonymity the thumbdrive offers, you can alternatively complete the assignment remotely. See the 'Installation' section for details on installing the required IDE, and email your assignment and name to jamcd@hawaii.edu. Note that by doing so, your submission will not be completely anonymous, but it will be pooled with the rest prior to analysis, and no attempt to connect it to you personally will be made by us, nor will this information be shared with the instructor or TAs.

Getting started

Processing is basically java, but the IDE handles the main class and function on its own. Instead you write a setup and draw function


				void setup(){
			//setup code here   
		}

		void draw(){
		 	//draw code here   
		}

The setup function gets called exactly once at the start of the program, but the draw code gets called 60 times every second.

I highly recommend you watch the setup video for a better guide, and the processing reference will likely also be quite useful.

Here is a video to help get you started. Note that the video includes a section on installation which should be optional since the IDE is on a thumbdrive.

If you have any other versions of processing on your computer, make sure they are closed. The IDE that pops up should have 0271 in the top corner and a small green > down in the bottom left corner. If either of these are missing you are using the wrong version.

The reference should be quite useful and contains documentation on all of the functions Processing has available. Here are a few specific functions you may find useful for this assignment

size(int width,int height) call this function once in setup to set the size of the window
background(int greyValue) or background(int red, int green, int blue) call this function as the thing in draw to erase the previous frame. If you don't call it, frames are persistent.
fill(int greyValue), stroke(int greyValue), fill(int red, int green, int blue) stroke(int red, int green, int blue) These set the fill or outline (stroke) of all shapes drawn after it to a specific color. Each also supports a 4th alpha number for transparent colors
line(int x1, int y1, int x2,int y2) draws a line from (x1,y1) to (x2,y2)
int width and int height; these are 2 built in constants you can use. They are set to the current width and height of the window
int mouseX, int mouseY not needed by this assignment, but this is the position of the mouse
loadPixels() loads the current screen values into the 1d pixels array, updatePixels() takes that array and sets each screen pixel to the value in the array.
println(String) shorthand for System.out.println(String)

note: (0,0) is the top left corner, and (width,height) is the bottom right corner

If you are having trouble Googling the IDE due to processing being a synonym for computing, try searching for "Processing3" instead.

The Actual Assignment

For this Assignment you are to make code to draw a complex fractal in the IDE. The definition of fractal is.... complicated? So we are just going to ignore the definition of fractal, and instead we are going to use the commonly used but wrong definition "A fractal is anything that is self-similar forever, no matter how far you zoom in". (For an interesting video on why this is wrong and what a fractal really is, see 3 blue 1 Brown's video on it).
The exact fractal or method is not specified, however it must be an equation defined fractal at least as complicated as the Mandelbrot set using the pixels array.

The Mandelbrot fractal is defined as all complex numbers c (dont panic, these "complex numbers" are just screenX+i*screenY) where the function f(z)=z^2+c does not diverge ever when you repeatedly put the previous output in as z, starting with z=0. In practical terms, "ever" isn't possible to calculate, so people pick a number of generations and check if it has "diverged" within that number of generations. To check if a number has "diverged" they check if it is outside of a circle with radius of 2 since every number outside that radius DOES diverge. Often Mandelbrot fractals are colored, black is always pixels that do not diverge (with in the given iterations), but other pixels are colored based on how many iterations they take to cross the circle edge. Your program should be able to work for any integer number of iterations, but 100 to 1000 iterations are good for testing. If you want to learn more about the Mandelbrot set, there is a good numberphile and 3 Blue 1 Brown video on it. If the above description appears intimidating, watch one of these videos, they really help understand what it is doing, and how to program it.

Other fractals you may consider include:

Julia Sets
Newton Fractal (for an interesting function such as x^3-1=0) (interesting video on Newton's fractal if you want)

Your program should be capable of drawing the fractal at any resolution (IE, if the screen gets bigger, draw a larger, more detailed fractal). The fractal you choose should also be defined by a specific function that has been ran for each pixel in the image. It should not be a recursive "replace all of X with Y" fractal such as Sierpinski_triangle.

Additionally, please write a brief summary of how you completed the assignment (ie, asked a friend, looked up an answer, just did it, etc) either as a comment at the top of your assignment or in a separate text document on the thumbdrive.

If the thumbdrive runs out of storage for some reason, you can feel free to delete the getting started video.

Grading

This assignment will be graded by completion. If you turn in a solution, you will get full credit.

Installation

If you don't want to use the provided thumbdrive, you can install a copy of the IDE your self. To install the IDE follow these steps

Installation on windows is easy, first download the zipped IDE Processing-windows.zip and extract it. Then launch Processing.exe. That should be all that is needed, the IDE should launch directly with no other install process

On Mac it is slightly harder, but not much. Download the zipped app Processing-mac.zip MacOs should automatically extract this for you. Find the app in your downloads folder and right click it. In this menu select open. You will see a warning asking if you trust the software, click yes and it should launch immediately with no further install.

If you are on Linux and do not have access to either of those, Email jamcd@hawaii.edu for a Linux version