Rick Wagner, Ph.D.

Richard J. Wagner

I wish to thank everyone who has ever helped or assisted me in any way, and that includes a lot of good people. Nobody is in this alone. I am an engineer and scientist at NGST at Space Park in Redondo Beach, California.

My personal interests include robotics and bonsai, as suggested by Ayse's cartoon:

Educational Items of Interest

• IEEE RAS Space Robotics Technical Committee.
• Robotics Instruction Course for Beach Cities Robotics, the high school FIRST robotics competition team 294, for which I am a mentor.
• Introduction to Automation for high school students.
• My 2004 BCR robot build and competion article for SERVO Magazine.
• BCR 2005 competition movies
• CAMS Robotics Sessions One, Two, and Three.
• Pythagoras' proof of the theorem bearing his name.
• My proof that the square roots of all prime numbers are irrational.
• A general Order(n) sorting algorithm (U.S. patent awarded May 25, 2004)).

Software

Applets

• Try your astronaut skill with the Lunar lander, with source code.
• Play tic tac toe, with source code.
• Taking the freeways to work? Try the traffic simulation, with source code.
• Mancala, an African board game.
• Homeostatic Chess Player, an applet implementation of machine chess.

Windows Shareware and Freeware

The software applications below require the dynamic link library (DLL) runtime, accessible here as vbrun.zip. Unzip the VBRUN300.DLL file and put it in your Windows system directory, if it's not there already.

• Going metric? Use the shareware program Easy Convert.
• Lawyer-Joke-a-Day (caution: politically incorrect shareware).
• Explore summation rule 2D cellular automata with Life Workshop, which, based on John Conway's Game of Life, lets you change rules on the fly and experiment with an extension to the hexagrid which illustrates the emergence of complexity in a simpler environment. Shareware.
• Crunch a big one with Big Number Cruncher. Freeware.
• Play the world's first 3D crossword puzzle. Freeware.

All pages copyright © 1995-2007 by Richard J. Wagner, all rights reserved.