I have been working on the AI for a tank game over the past couple of weeks. Here are some videos of a few iterations I went through:
All the code was written from scratch by me in Java. The A* algorithm took forever mainly due to long debugging times (>10hours). Next, I plan to integrate this with a human tank and thus have a working game!
One of the biggest aspects of our tank game AI will be pathfinding. For this reason, I found “Programming Game AI by Example” by Mat Buckland. It has a lot of information on pathfinding as well as various aspects of game AI coding which will be of great use to us.
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Game-Example-Mat-Buckland/dp/1556220782
We are entering a world where drones are becoming cheaply available and everything is under video surveillance. This of course has its pros and its cons. Pros being that criminal activity is constantly monitored and logged making the world a safer place. The big issue is in who can access the data. Of course, if such a database exists, anyone can access it with the right tools (and a bit of cash).
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/the-pros-and-cons-of-a-surveillance-society/
Just started learning some very basic Lisp. It’s very strange coming from an imperative background.
I am a hands on type of person. I like to see what is happening rather than just theorizing so I think engineering is the path for me.
(London my hometown)
I wrote a simple program to visually represent bubbleSort being applied to an array.
First attempt at graphics programming.
Splash Screen:
At the moment Computer Science isn’t seen as a cool subject at school. This stops many of the ‘cool kids’ from choosing the subject.
I think that this will soon change because of the job opportunities the tech industry has to offer.
Very interesting stuff from the father of computer science: Alan Turing
Read about some of the stuff he did: http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has many benefits, however along with these come a multitude of issues. This is especially apparent when it comes to ethics. As humanoid AI’s become more and more realistic, people will start developing emotions for virtual people which could lead to future problems.
For example in the comic strip below the human develops feelings for the virtual woman (Lisa) only to discover that she is in fact not real.
In the future I can only imagine that laws will be put in place to control what virtual humans can be programmed to do.
lucaciraolo 
