So for about all of July I had been working with Ryan(blog) on a project dubbed Droids – a simple AI experiment. I got the idea for the project after starting to read a book called Prey by Michael Chrichton, which is about nanobots(incredibly small robots) and the powers of collective intelligence. In the book, the nanobots escape and go rogue, of course.
Anyways, the program created objects called Droids which were entities with their own intelligences that would actively search out Food objects on a generated space. C# and the Visual Studio 2008 for C#.NET were the preferred development languages and IDE for the project. We got far enough that the objects were created with their associated data(coordinates, id numbers, etc) and had a method for the droids to move towards the nearest food objects(just no method to find them). After that all we needed to do was graphically represent all of this data to have a functioning program. Future prospects for the program included evaluating the levels of food and droids(some bigger, some worth more, etc) so the droids would plot the best possible(within their scope of knowledge, at least) course of action, and even a scriptable interface to the droid objects(allowing people to script their own intelligences for the droid objects, aiding research into massive agent-based intelligences, and so on).
I would love to get attached to a focused and driven C# or Python project sometime in the near future, if for nothing more than to watch and learn about software development and programming. I’m especially interested in graphics and network programming, though interfaces seem to be my specialty.
We scrapped that a while back out of boredom, and have since moved on to work on developing an IRC network and associated community(link) called SlushNet with Ryan.
