Well this is interesting. Via Blue’s News: Slashdot has a post titled, “AI Researchers Produce New Kind of PC Game“. From the post (exerpted from a “Bandwidth Exceeded” reference site):
Unlike most games today that use scripting for the AI, non-player-characters in NERO learn new tactics in real-time using advanced machine learning techniques.
C|Net has a slideshow from the currently in-progress Paris Air Show. Notice that the first image in the slideshow shows a UCAV (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle). Now look close and you should see a few of those flying drones/robots in the above conceptual image taken from the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) website. If you read the MIT Technology Review article I mentioned a couple months back in this post, the videogame aspect of all this is pretty obvious. Since that time however a couple more related bits have come along, including: news about swarming robots, word on an attempt to create a virtual brain, an announcement that the keel is being laid for a new kind of warship (the Littoral Combat Ship, a variation of which would presumably make an excellent platform for UCAVs), and plenty of discussion about military spending. There’s even another article similar to the MIT Tech Review piece – this time over on the Popular Science website (read “Trust Me – I’m a Robot” here) .
And all I wanted to see were some pretty pictures of the new Boeing jet I mentioned a couple days ago. Looks like pieces of this augmented reality stuff are everywhere; it’s just maybe not entirely obvious how it all fits together.
I came across an interesting story couple days ago over on New World Notes (a blog maintained by a Second Life-embedded reporter) about fish with artificial intelligence coded into them swimming and replicating in the simulation. I wanted to see it for myself so logged on today for a peek. Very cool. Unfortunately there were only a few fish left as apparently there was some kind of population explosion which forced the Creator’s unforgiving hand (sounds alot like a Flood story to me). No matter. It was still interesting to see them “swim” around. The pyramid object you kinda see at the bottom of the above image (hiding behind the lowest fish) is a food/sphere “dispenser” and they didn’t stray too far from that. And while they swam around me, they didn’t appear too interested.
My favorite part of the story however is actually in the comments section, where the following line sounded especially intriguing:
A virus was quickly introduced to kill off the mutant fish before they either crashed the servers or they evolved a way of teleporting to the main grid.
That’s classic. You can read the whole story and comments here.
I’m posting this mostly because I know what I’m posting next (above), so read this article over on Wired and then check out the above post.
(wonder if we can somehow link up that new-fangled stem cell breakthrough into all this virtual schtuff)