mechatronic mayhem

In fact, the whole justification for the comic is largely to draw robots and fantasy creatures in the same book.

Cyriaque Lamar

io9 interview

Nonplayer preview

Sex = Death.  Evolutionarily speaking, at least.  Simple enough concept:  We became extraneous as soon as sex replaced division of single-celled organisms.  Post-procreation, the body became extraneous.  An afterthought.

Simple enough, but I never thought of it before.

Not the main thrust of the talk, which is interesting enough without that point:

Harvey Fineberg:  Are we ready for neo-evolution

Dude can control a rc helicopter with his freaking brain but can’t match audio levels.  Still, though, pretty impressive…

Now, to make it work with a rc lawnmower.  We’ll be hacking up the westside childrens with our brains!!!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Brain-Controlled-RC-Helicopter/

http://brainstorms.puzzlebox.info/

Just dredged this out of my all but defunct liveJournal blog…

My supervisor asked me to fill out a career map, complete with long-term and short-term goals.  Since I don’t have aspirations to become a manager, I thought I’d more clearly define my user interface design goals.

Since that long-term bit is in there, I thought I’d see if I could factor in artificial intelligence.  Not necessarily the personal, 3d talking head idea of AI.  More of Google’s personalized search, home page, and contextualized advertisement ideas.

As I was jotting those notes down, it occurred to me that the next step would be to create one user interface (per user) which interfaced with all of our applications.  It could query those applications in much the same way that search/data mining works.  It could not only display data from disparate sources, it could correlate it in to charts and graphs.  It could also correlate it with outside data available via the internet.

Once it had the data, it could actually do something with it.  Users could perform all tasks without having to learn new interfaces.

Way spiffier than personalizing your color scheme.

So, I started a search for “Google AI.”  An article by George Dyson was one of the first articles that popped up:  http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson05/dyson05_index.html

I thought he was rambling a bit to begin with, but then it boiled down to this:

“However, once the digital universe is thoroughly mapped, and initialized by us searching for meaningful things and following meaningful paths, it will inevitably be colonized by codes that will start doing things with the results. Once a system of template-based-addressing is in place, the door is opened to code that can interact directly with other code, free at last from a rigid bureaucracy requiring that every bit be assigned an exact address. You can (and a few people already are) write instructions that say “Do THIS with THAT” — without having to specify exactly Where or When. This revolution will start with simple, basic coded objects, on the level of nucleotides heading out on their own and bringing amino acids back to a collective nest.”

I think I just had a UI/AI Zen moment. ~~~~~ ;o

Goddammit.  I want to base jump from user interface design to game artificial intelligence development.  I only understand a fifth of this article, but that’s the freaking point:

http://aigamedev.com/open/editorial/open-challenges-fps/

Thanks, Dick!