ShredLog vs Neurex

ShredLog is the first goal tracker and electronic journal for Footbag! Why ShredLog? To have a tool that will help you to reason about your game. The more you know about how you are kicking (e.g., tricks you are hitting), the more you can adjust your game to, for example, practice tricks or concepts you haven't practiced a lot. This will help you become a more well-rounded player. The idea for the app came about over many years of kicking experience...I started kicking in the late 1990s. I have early memories, just a few, of doing mirages and butterflies during lunchtime at High School. When I entered university in 2000, I was blessed to be just down the road from Greg "GFSmoothie" Nelson. He changed the course of my life to one that would include footbag for decades to come (and still going!). During my footbag career thus far, I have had numerous notebooks with notes from footbag sessions, including tricks I hit, how many times I hit them, etc. As I completed one notebook, I would buy another and the old notebook would eventually get lost to time. As a result, I don't have any history of the kinds of tricks I was hitting, say, 5 years ago. If I had a way to save all of my notes into one place, and be able to reason about it (e.g., by having summary statistics about the tricks I wrote down), I believe I would be a much stronger player. This was the motivation for developing this app: Give Footbaggers, both newcomers and seasoned veterans, a tool to help them remember and reason about their game. ShredLog has four main features, each described below: A. GOALS, B. JOURNAL, C. STATISTICS, D. DICTIONARY. A. GOALS Set and manage goals. A goal consists of the following: 1. A trick name (NOTE: Tricks must be selected from the dropdown menu) 2. Set foot (i.e., which foot the trick starts on) 3. How many times you want to hit the trick 4. A start date and end date (i.e., a timeframe in which you want to hit the trick) Goals can be in one of four states: 1. TODO (A goal has been created with zero progress towards completion) 2. STARTED (A goal has been created with some progress towards completion, but not complete yet) 3. COMPLETED (A goal has 100% progress, and is therefore finished) 4. EXPIRED (A goal's end date is in the past) How goals work: 1. Set a goal (e.g., left-foot-set mirage x 10, from today until next week) 2. Enter tricks in your journal as you hit them (e.g., left-foot-set mirage x 5, today) 3. The app automatically updates your goals based on your journal entries, allowing you to focus on what you love: kicking! You will be congratulated once you complete a goal. B. JOURNAL ENTRIES ShredLog provides a journal for you to record all the tricks you hit. A journal entry consists of the following: 1. A trick name 2. How may times you hit the trick 3. The date you hit the trick How to use the journal: 1. Enter a trick (NOTE: Tricks must be selected from the dropdown menu) 2. Select the set foot (i.e., the foot that the trick starts on) 3. Enter how many times you hit the trick 4. Enter the day you hit the trick (NOTE: by default the day is set for the current day) ShredLog updates your goal progress for you based on your journal entries. C. STATISTICS ShredLog amalgamates your goal and journal data into useful summary statistics. It gives you information about the following: 1. Streaks (e.g., the longest number of days you have kicked in a row) 2. Goals (i.e., How many goals you currently have in each of the four states a goal can be in) 3. Journal (e.g., How many total tricks you have hit) 4. Most-practiced trick (What trick have you hit the most, how many times, and more) D. DICTIONARY ShredLog provides a searchable dictionary of information for over 700 footbag tricks. For each trick, this includes the following: 1. Trick name 2. Alternate names 3. How many adds the trick is 4. Job's notation (that is, an explanation of how to do the trick) I hope that you find ShredLog beneficial. Keep kicking! TJ

Neurex is an expert system based on a multi-layered neural network. The era of neural networks and connectionism offers a new perspective on obtaining reliable knowledge for decision support and its user-friendly application. Traditional expert systems, which are rule-based and/or frame-based, often face challenges in creating a reliable knowledge base. Neural networks can overcome these difficulties. It's possible to create a knowledge base without experts, solely using data collections that describe the solved area, or with experts whose knowledge can be verified during the learning process. The expert system's usage process can be outlined as follows: 1. Definition of the Neural Network Topology: This step involves defining the number of input and output facts, as well as determining the number of hidden layers. 2. Formulation of Input and Output Facts (Attributes): Each fact is linked to a neuron in the input or output layer. The range of values for each attribute is also defined. 3. Definition of the Training Set: Patterns are entered using truth values (e.g., 0-100%) or values from the range defined in the previous steps. In case that patterns represent time series it is possible to define number of patterns in sequence (time window) for the prediction of the output. Value 1 says that there is no time context and patterns are time independent. 4. Learning Phase of the Network: The weights of the connections (synapses) between neurons, the slopes of the sigmoid functions, and the thresholds of the neurons are computed using the Back Propagation (BP) method. Options are available to define parameters for this process, such as the learning rate and the number of learning cycles. These values form the expert system's memory or knowledge base. The learning process's results are displayed using the mean squared error, and the index of the worst pattern and its percentage error is also shown. 5. Consultation with the System: In this phase, the values of the input facts are defined, after which the values of the output facts are immediately deduced.