Re: What's The Name Of This Gaming Thing?

  • From: Kerneels Roos <kerneels@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2011 15:56:57 +0200

Hi list,

Sorry, it was a bit of a "whoo, look at me, look what I know" kind of answer to Jim's question -- don't take it too seriously. Had I only paid more attention in class, worked that bit harder I might just have been busy with this kind of stuff on a daily basis. Just imagine... Job satisfaction here we come! But then again, perhaps one would go mad, grow serious facial hair and hardly ever go out into the real world if your job was that interesting and nice -- not to mention the pizza / coka cola / beer belly! Ha ha!

Would welcome any books on such topics now that my hard copy books requires significant processing before it's in a digital format fit for audio consumption.

Jim, I thinnk a Java project to produce a PNG reader / validator for chess games is an excellent idea! Count me in on that project please! Even if there are PNG APIs for Java it would be an excellent excersise to build one with good OO principals during the design. Would also be nice if it one day could incorporate a chess diagram recognition component that could describe chess diagrams -- like an OCR for chess board diagrams if you like.

Jim all that AI and CI jargon is more bark than bite really. Doesn't it sound impressive hey? The truth is, as with most things, it is finite meaning you can grasp it if you put your mind to it.

The real beauty for me of AI and CI and any science that looks to the natural world for ideas and inspiration is that, for me, it keeps on astounding me as to how complex, clever and majestic this world we live in really is. See also [1].
How can this be a product of chance I ask you?

The illustration of Socrates, probably penned by Plato fits well in here. It is of a group of people tied down facing the inside wall of a shallow cave. Outside the mouth of the cave a huge fire is blazing, and between the fire and the cave a procession of every kind of animal is underway. The cave captives marvel at the shadows being cast against the cave walls. With a fair bit of interest they ooh and aah over the dancing shadows on the wall.

Then, the unthinkable happens. One cave captive is freed from his bounds. He jumps up, looks around and behold, he sees the prosession of real animals, the fire, the shadows....

In one sense, as far as I understand it, this was the thesis of Socrates -- this world is but a shadow of something even more real and wonderful.

Socrates considered himself the freed cave captive -- as far as I have it. Any philosophy student it's like that hey?

Why does a linux fanatic try so hard to convince that it's the better system? In his mind he's that freed captive, to put it in OS terms if you like. The question is, is he right. In landing, just thought I'd throw that in there, so no one can say the post was off topic ha ha!

[1] The flip side of all of this is of course, how crewel harsh and mercyless this world also is, but for my take on this please contact me off list should you be interested.

Kerneels




On 2/18/2011 2:33 PM, Ken Perry wrote:

Kerneels,

This is one of the best answers of this question I have seen outside of a class room. I have nothing to add except if you're looking for books on this sort of thing do a google search on "game intelligence book"

ken

*From:*programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Kerneels Roos
*Sent:* Friday, February 18, 2011 3:18 AM
*To:* programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* Re: What's The Name Of This Gaming Thing?

Hi Jim,

Nice question!

The problem of solving strategy games such as chess and tic tac toe and drafts involves generating a search tree that represents as many possibilities for each move at each level as you have resources for, and then, by searching finding the best possible next move with an eventual favourable end in mind. In essense, the program looks ahead into the future to avoid being duped by sub optimal moves which might yeald short term benefits but eventual damnation!

A big part of this is searching the tree or graph of possibilities efficiently, representing the structures efficiently and employing huristics (rules of thumb) to keep things from exploding into too large to handle data sets.

It's part of the field of classic AI and it has been studied for decades now. It's sometimes also referred to as symbolic AI as it deals with discrete values and usually involves a type of math called discrete math (as aposed to calculas for example, that deals with continuous systems, values approaching 0, values approaching infinity and fractions).

All this might sound fairly complicated but I can assure you it's actually not, and many of these classic AI problems have been solved sufficiently. For example, there are chess systems that can't be beaten. Yes, the machines can beat us at very narrowly defined games such as chess, and it can only beat the world champions with significant effort on the machine designer's part, to such an extent that it's debatable if the contest is even fair or not.

For example, in the whole Deep Blue saga, IBM programmed their system to beat Gary Kasparov in particular. Had another world champion shown up for the tournament it might have had different results -- an indication of what an amazing game chess is and how hard it is to beat the best mind on earth.

Moving on from classic AI, there is a very interesting field which have been termed CI (Computational Intelligence) which concerns it'itself with some of the same goals as classic AI, but it does this with things like artificial neural networks (symulation of how a brain functions), particle swarm optimisation (modelling how swarms of living insects operate to find solutions to complex problems) and many other models of real life living systems that exhibit intelligent behaviour.

Wow, where has the time gone!

Cheers,
Kerneels


On 2/17/2011 11:17 PM, qubit wrote:

So did your coffee working yield the answer? *smile*

    --le

    ----- Original Message -----

    *From:* Homme, James <mailto:james.homme@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

    *To:* programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
    <mailto:programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

    *Sent:* Thursday, February 17, 2011 2:43 PM

    *Subject:* RE: What's The Name Of This Gaming Thing?

    Hay Laura,

    I asked the question before my coffee started working this morning.

    Jim

    Jim Homme,

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    Phone: 412-544-1810. Skype: jim.homme

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    *From:* programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
    <mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
    [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *qubit
    *Sent:* Thursday, February 17, 2011 3:35 PM
    *To:* programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
    <mailto:programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
    *Subject:* Re: What's The Name Of This Gaming Thing?

    heuristics are just educated guesses.  I suppose it can be useful
    in developing strategies, but it's not the only part of the
    science... Hey Jim, this must have been a good question with all
    the attention it has received...*smile*

    --le

        ----- Original Message -----

        *From:* Christopher <mailto:ccoale427@xxxxxxxxx>

        *To:* programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
        <mailto:programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

        *Sent:* Thursday, February 17, 2011 2:29 PM

        *Subject:* Re: What's The Name Of This Gaming Thing?

        Heuristics, perhaps?

        On 2/17/2011 12:25 PM, Haden Pike wrote:

        Artificial Intelligence?  Logic, perhaps?  Just tossing ideas
        out there.
        Haden

        On 2/17/2011 7:58 AM, Homme, James wrote:

        Hi,

        I'm not sure how to ask this question since I don't have the
        background yet. When you have a program that is playing a
        game, let's say a simple game, like TicTacToe, and it tries to
        figure out what the best move is, what is that whole subject
        called? Or when you have a game where you are moving two
        people around and you don't want them to run into one-another,
        is that the same subject?

        Thanks.

        Jim

        Jim Homme,

        Usability Services,

        Phone: 412-544-1810. Skype: jim.homme

        Internal recipients, Read my accessibility blog
        <http://mysites.highmark.com/personal/lidikki/Blog/default.aspx>.
        Discuss accessibility here
        
<http://collaborate.highmark.com/COP/technical/accessibility/default.aspx>.
        Accessibility Wiki: Breaking news and accessibility advice
        
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--
Kerneels Roos
Cell: +27 (0)82 309 1998
Skype: cornelis.roos
"There are only two kinds of programming languages in the world; those everyone complains about, and those nobody uses."

--
Kerneels Roos
Cell: +27 (0)82 309 1998
Skype: cornelis.roos

"There are only two kinds of programming languages in the world; those everyone 
complains about, and those nobody uses."

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