http://www.masterbaboon.com The sea of the simulation Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:50:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en At the beginning of September I've been invited to teach at a summer school about scientific programming. The whole experience has been really rewarding, but it was the student's project that got me going: we had the students write artificial intelligence algorithms for the agents of a PacMan-like game, and ... http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/09/pacman-capture-the-flag-a-fun-game-for-artificial-intelligence-development-and-education/ In the previous two posts I showed how to make use of decision theory to write a game AI that forms a model of its opponent and adapts its strategy accordingly. The AI could be improved in several ways: The most obvious improvement would be to build a better model of the ... http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/09/my-ai-reads-your-mind-extensions-part-3/ In the last post I discussed how it is possible to program a game Artificial Intelligence to exploit a player's unconscious biases using a simple mathematical model. In the karate game above, the AI uses that model in order to do the largest amount ... http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/05/my-ai-reads-your-mind-and-kicks-your-ass-part-2/ I regularly read about people complaining that AI in games should be improved. I definitely agree with them, but here's a argument why pushing it to the limits might not be such a good idea: computers can easily discover and exploit our unconscious biases. Magic? ESP? More like a simple application ... http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/04/my-ai-can-read-your-mind-part-1/ Did you ever need to sample from a Dirichlet distribution in Actionscript 3.0? What about computing a value of the Gamma function? Probably not ;-) In case you did, I wrote a class with a few math methods: a function to sample from multinomial distributions; this is useful if you need ... http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/02/advanced-math-functions-for-as3/ I wrote a simple game to learn how to store on and retrieve data from a server-side database. The rules are simple: you have to guess 2/3 of the average of the guesses of all the players. So, for example, if you think that the other players guessed on average ... http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/02/guess-23-game-sending-data-from-flash-to-a-remote-database/ Here's another classic from the 80's: an artificial life simulation, where bugs move on a virtual Petri dish, hunting for bacteria. If they manage to survive until adulthood, and accumulate enough energy from bacteria, the bugs reproduce and generate two copies of themselves. In the reproduction process, the genetic code ... http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/02/simulated-evolution/ In games and other graphical applications one has to keep track multiple sprites and detect collisions between them. A naif approach would loop over all sprites and check for collision with *every other sprite*. This is, of course, terribly inefficient and can be very slow even for a small number ... http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/02/spatial-database-for-collision-detection/ I decided to get my feet wet with Flash + ActionScript programming with a classic of the 80's: 2-dimensional Cellular Automata! A 2D CA is a grid of cells, each of which can be in either an "alive" or "dead" state. The state of each cell evolves in time, according to ... http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/02/2d-cellular-automata/