Matthew Consterdine's

This week I used Markov Chains to create folk music. It is output in ABC and rendered using ABCjs.

The music it makes is a little bit strange and it doesn’t really understand how many beats should be in a bar, but if that is a problem up the iterations. Keep raising the iterations and eventually you might even hear a tune that you know!

Under the hood, it is relatively simple. I started by downloaded about 300 folk tunes from Sourceforge. After making an Ajax request to load them, it “parses” each tune into a data structure that is easy to work with. Then two Markov Chains are generated for the title and for the music, the other attributes are just chosen randomly. Tunes can be played back with or without chords, and on any instrument. Click here to start.

This project demonstrates the ability to visualize, and trace transactions through the Bitcoin network, evaluating three different methods. Namely poison, haircut and First-In-First-Out (FIFO).

To achieve this, a web application was created to first build up a network graph representing Bitcoin addresses as nodes, and transactions as directional edges. This allows the user to easily grasp the history of any given Bitcoin address, and then trace any transaction either up or down the graph.

By clicking on a node in the graph, the application will automatically load that address and it’s associated transactions, adding it to the graph. By hovering over a node in the graph, the tool-tip on the right will appear. It displays a number of useful statistics about the address, and gives the user the option to trace transactions by clicking on any of the colourful buttons.

• Try online
• Read the report

It’s done, it’s over! Months in the making, my dissertation is finished an available from lect.me. My advice for future students, is to start early. Projects like these always take longer then you expect.