The past weekends I’ve been spending some time on a pet game project. Writing a small engine, building a storyline and creating visuals. When it comes to 3D games there’s a lot to consider, from aesthetics through software architecture to AI, and naturally, my curious mind has been venturing ideas in all these areas. Lately I’ve started to think that maybe the whole thing is worth more than just random jabs of code and color.

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My favorite game of all time must be Myst — a puzzle solver that held me occupied for several months finding my way around surreal architectures. I’ve yet to find a game which has captured my attention to that extent, but there’ve been some that came close; and they all require either a puzzle solving aspect to it or a very original and compelling storyline for me to enjoy them (usually both). Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave many games that I can truly enjoy, but the recently debuted Portal looks like a strong contender.

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My brother called me today to tip me off on some exciting news: An article the New Journal of Physics reports evidence that inorganic space plasma might form life like structures. Fantastic! Simulations created by a Mr. Tsytovich and his colleagues at the General Physics Institute, Russian Academy of Science, have provided evidence that under the right conditions, dust particles may allow plasma to self-organize and exhibit behavior normally associated with organisms, such as self-replication.

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Now we know. Cross a genetic algorithm with your favorite toy from childhood (Lego!) and you get intelligent, biologically reminiscent structures. Dr. Pablo Funes and his team at the Dynamical & Evolutionary Machine Organization devised a very cool simulator that can be told to create Lego structures of various kinds, such as bridges, using evolutionary algorithms. The creative aspect provides interesting food for thought: the system is given a goal and the solution design is entirely dependant on the machine.

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Everybody can agree that the number of teachers versus students significantly effects the quality of education. With a high number of students to each teacher, the courses have to be adapted to the group and less attention payed to each students characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. I’ve been aware of this pesty fact through my own experience of school and consider it a noteworthy problem of modern education. So, let’s mass produce teachers to come to the rescue.

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I just came across a relatively recent interview in Discover Magazine with Marvin Minsky, legendary professor at MIT and A.I. pioneer. In it he does a bit of bashing of neuroscience, which I feel I lack knowledge to comment on, but I’m absolutely with him on the claim that artificial intelligence is the way to understand the mind. Nobody can expect to understand the workings of the brain by handwritten formulas or tracing neural interactions — it’s too complex. We need simulations. I’m putting a small excerpt from the interview below, but you should really read the whole thing.

Neuroscientists’ quest to understand consciousness is a hot topic right now, yet you often pose things via psychology, which seems to be taken less seriously. Are you behind the curve?

I don’t see neuroscience as serious. What they have are nutty little theories, and they do elaborate experiments to confirm them and don’t know what to do if they don’t work. This book presents a very elaborate theory of consciousness. Consciousness is a word that confuses possibly 16 different processes. Most neurologists think everything is either conscious or not. But even Freud had several grades of consciousness. When you talk to neuroscientists, they seem so unsophisticated; they major in biology and know about potassium and calcium channels, but they don’t have sophisticated psychological ideas. Neuroscientists should be asking: What phenomenon should I try to explain? Can I make a theory of it? Then, can I design an experiment to see if one of those theories is better than the others? If you don’t have two theories, then you can’t do an experiment. And they usually don’t even have one.

So as you see it, artificial intelligence is the lens through which to look at the mind and unlock the secrets of how it works?

Yes, through the lens of building a simulation. If a theory is very simple, you can use mathematics to predict what it’ll do. If it’s very complicated, you have to do a simulation. It seems to me that for anything as complicated as the mind or brain, the only way to test a theory is to simulate it and see what it does. One problem is that often researchers won’t tell us what a simulation didn’t do. Right now the most popular approach in artificial intelligence is making probabilistic models. The researchers say, “Oh, we got our machine to recognize handwritten characters with a reliability of 79 percent.” They don’t tell us what didn’t work.

All I can say is wow.

Microsoft released their MS Robotics Studio yesterday, which I applaude, but of course have my issues with because it’s Microsoft related (more on that below). The studio is “a software development kit for the robotics community that can be used with a wide variety of hardware, by a wide audience of users” says Tandy Trower, General Manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group.

Yeah, I applaude the release of free software for robotics — but I have my concerns. I commented on the Studio’s Digg submission that there was inevitably something in the studio which would handcuff you and your robot to the Microsoft empire, mentioning C# as one of those things. Immediately, an angry Microsoft user accused me of not knowing about Mono, which are additional tools produced by Novell to run .Net technologies on platforms other than Windows (OS X, FreeBSD, Linux, etc.).

Of course, the angry MS user was right. It was a bit unthoughtful of me. But overall I feel that Mono just underlines my concerns: Mono wasn’t initiated by Microsoft; it was built by the community to make amends for MS’ tendency towards maintaining cross-platform incompatibility.

I’m tired of arguing about Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux: I don’t hate Microsoft.

But Microsoft is a corporate giant. A person, basically — just a giant one. When companies grow this large, their bloated figure becomes too greasy for any single man grasp. Profits become an indispensible and controlling part of the hive mind; the overall result of which is that the users become the commodity: They are no longer selling good software to satisfy the user — they’re producing software which maximizes profits and incorporates the user as a cog in their corporation. The consumers become the consumed.

By making their software most compatible with their own system (or completely incompatible with others), they are trying to enforce that people buy more from their empire. I came across a robots.net post from 2005, which has info related to what I’m trying to convey:

Nelson Bridwell sends us Microsoft news from the International Conference on Advanced Robotics in Seattle where Stewart Tansley revealed details of what could be Microsoft’s latest effort to assimilate the field of robotics. Apparently this is now part of a larger strategy to create more University level students accustomed to using and developing proprietary software. “They have decided that the best way to increase enrollment is to work with universities to incorporate robotics and computer games into the computer science curriculum as class projects where students can exercise their technical skills.” The robotics and computer games would be developed using various Microsoft proprietary software tools instead of the currently preferred Open Source / Free software tools. Part of their plan is to develop robot platforms with hardware that runs Microsoft’s .net language natively and offering them at much lower prices than conventional robotics hardware…. read more

I buy Apple because with their ~3% markeshare I feel they’re still small enough to actually care about their customers, while still having the power of a company to produce big things for me. And I get that feeling every time they come up with a simple and elegant solution to my problems.

That’s not the feeling I get when I’m called by friends and family to come over and fix their Windows machines, going through dozens of helpless help files telling me to go this webpage when the problem is that the web connection isn’t working. I don’t want the same thing happening to the poor robots.

In summary; while I think the MSRobotics Studio might be good to increase interest in robotics, MS’ patents and copyrights might potentially limit the growth of your robot. I’d recommend looking into some of the other solutions that are already available before making any decisions.

• The Open Automaton Project (OAP)
• The Open Robot Control Software (OROCOS)
• The Rossum Project
• Communities & Other stuff
• Mindmakers.org — people building modular large scale A.I. systems
• DMOZ listing of robotics software

(Robot image credit: The Open Automaton Project)