During the last Leipzig Games Convention, Sony presented some game titles in advance which, I think, set the trend for a new games generation. I personally endorse this decision (which already started other game companies like Nintendo with its Wii) to create new playing experiences instead of using the so boring shot-them-up scheme (both in 1st and 3rd person).

Of all the videos put in the PlayStation Store web, the most attracting to me was the trailer of EyePet.

Eyepet, is, of course, a virtual pet. It only exists within your TV and your PS3. You can touch it (her?), stroke it, change its look, hairdress, etc. or just create some toy for it (by drawing it on a card) and see how she plays with it.

In a previous post about the singularity, I wrote that one of the signs of the coming of singularity is the mix of real and virtual things, like this example.

In short, EyePet es a very interesting experiment of augmented reality (I’ll write about some day). I suggest you to watch the video.

Posted by Boriel as Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Interesting, Games, Artificial Life, Game Consoles, Vídeo at 8.25 pm

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As happened with other topics, long ago I wanted to write about this one: Artificial life and John Conway’s Life Game.

If you already happen to know about it or have just searched the internet, I’m afraid I’m not going to tell you something new, or maybe I am: John Horton Conway is a mathematician born in Liverpool, United Kingdom in 1937. One of his most known (and he has worked many) field are mathematic games, like Sprouts Game, or the Game of Life I’m going to explain here.

Life game is played on a reticulated board or grid that is supposed to be infinite in extension. Obviously, this cannot exist in practice, but is ok to use one large enough. Each cell of this grid is in one of two states: live or dead, represented with different colors (here white and black respectively).

This “game” is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, needing no input from human players.

The game is turn-based. At each step (also called generation) every cell in the board is examined and its new state calculated. Finally, when all the new states are known, the board is updated.

The cell next state is calculated following 3 rules that although really simple (as it happen on most Conway’s games) can lead to surprisingly complex configurations:

These three simple rules creates a chaotic system: changing just one cell state in a configuration can lead to dramatically different results which ranges from total extinction (empty board) to stable oscillating population or even more interesting life forms.

I’ve developed a simulator for the game of life. It uses the Firefox (of which canvas), and it should work ok on every browser (Firefox, Safari, Opera…) except Internet Explorer (where the emulation is slow and rather buggy). If you’re using IE, please switch to Firefox to try it. Anyway, here you are:

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Posted by Boriel as Computer Science, Games, Mathematics, Artificial Life at 10.04 pm

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Redes is a scientific divulgative program emitted in Spain, and driven by Eduard Punset. The 2nd to last was about the Technological Singularity. This term refers to a point in which tecnology and biological human being as we know will be one and practically indistinguishable: Virtual and Real will merge and become fully interconnencted. It won’t be like in “The Matrix”. In “The Matrix” the virtual world was not part of the reality, whilst in the Singularity, the virtual world will become part of the real one.

One of its prophets is Ray Kurzweil, inventor of Kurzweil sound synthetizers among other things.

Metaverses, Virtual HyperRealities, Naomachines integrated with our minds, expanding it and conecting it, making mental backups, etc. are just some of the Kurzweil’s predictions, who also warns the skepticals: The Singularity is called that way because, beyond some point (which seems to have happened already), technology evolves in an exponential way, which contradicts our intuition which works in a lineal fashion. As an example, if after 5 years we could make 10 times faster computers, after 10 years we could create 100 times faster (not just 20 times faster) ones. This makes Singularity something chaotic and unpredictable.

If you are interested in this topic, have a look on this video:

Posted by Boriel as Science, Sin categoría, Artificial Intelligence, Vídeo at 8.21 pm

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This early morning I devoted a while to test an idea I have had in mind for years. In fact, I’ve told Edanna several times:

Why don’t we use Markov’s chains to implement several learning parts of an AI software? I’ve always thought human-machine interaction (a relatively new field which offers big promises) can borrow much of Markov’s ideas for its application.

When we learn our mother tongue, in some way, or neurons learn to expect that after a words sequence only a reduced sets of words can follow. And, in some manner, this is what I’m going o do next.

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Posted by Boriel as Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics at 12.06 pm

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Well, first things first: I’m not a footbal (soccer) fan, but must say congratulations to the Spaniards footbal team and their fans for having won the Eurocup (read the news -Spanish- at El País and El Mundo, for example).

I, on my behalf, have something else to celebrate: I’ve eventually released 1.0 version of the ZX Spectrum BASIC compiler. You can download it and give it a try, if interested.

If you’re having troubles either installing or using it, or suspect of a bug, please ask for help at the forum.

Posted by Boriel as Compilers at 11.08 pm

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