Miscellaneous

AI and abstract simulation

Physical and biological simulation, Artificial Life

Digital media and art

Quantum_computing

 

Miscellaneous

 

Making Indie Games

"If you want to get started making video games you have come to the right place. This site has a getting started guide that is designed to get you up off your feet and ready to start making games. There are also Graphics, Audio, and Torque Game Builder tutorials for those of you who already know where you are going. Now that you are here I recommend you go out there and explore. You just might learn something you never knew before."

Independent_game_development

"The process of creating video games without the the financial support of a video game publisher. While large companies can create independent games, they are typically designed by an individual or a small team of as many as ten people, depending on the complexity of the project. These games may take years to be constructed from the ground up or can be completed in a matter of days or even hours depending on complexity, participants, and design goal.

Indie video games are often grouped together with shareware, freeware and open source software. Indie developers are generally motivated by strong personal interest in the title they are working on, often a niche game that would not be produced by the mainstream. They tend to belong to some sort of community (usually Internet-based) which recognizes developers.

Driven by digital distribution, the concept of independent video game development has spawned an "indie" movement.^[1] These games often focus on innovation,^[2] and have occasionally become extremely successful.

 

British Scientist Warns We Must Protect The Vulnerable From Robots

"Top robotics expert Professor Noel Sharkey, of the University of Sheffield, has called for international guidelines to be set for the ethical and safe application of robots before it is too late. Professor Sharkey, writing in the prestigious Science journal, believes that as the use of robots increases, decisions about their application will be left to the military, industry and busy parents instead of international legislative bodies.

...

Service robots are currently being used in all walks of life, from child-minding robots to robots that care for the elderly. These types of robots can be controlled by a mobile phone or from a PC, allowing input from camera "eyes" and remote talking from caregivers. Sophisticated elder-care robots like the Secom "My Spoon" automatic feeding robot; the Sanyo electric bathtub robot that automatically washes and rinses; and the Mitsubishi Wakamura robot, used for reminding people to take their medicine, are already in widespread use.

...

Professor Sharkey urges his fellow scientists and engineers working in robotics to be mindful of the unanticipated risks and the ethical problems linked to their work. He believes that robots for care represent just one of many ethically problematic areas that will soon arise from the increase in their use, and that policy guidelines for ethical and safe application need to be set before the guidelines set themselves."

Getting Started with Arduino

"The Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based around a microcontroller. It accepts inputs, such as signals from sensors (light, temperature, moisture, etc.) or data from the Internet or wireless devices, and sends output signals to devices, such as LEDS, motors, speakers, MIDI sequencers, computers, and so on. You can write programs for the Arduino on a Mac, Windows, or Linux machine and load them onto the Arduino with a USB cable"

 

edupunk

Edupunk is an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude.^{[1] [2]} The New York Times defines it as "an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like Powerpoint and Blackboard, and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and D.I.Y. ethos of ’70s bands like the Clash to the classroom."^[3]

 

dorkbot, people doing strange things with electricity

Dorkbot PDX, particulaly for Arduino development:

"... has crawled out of the womb and is in the now permanent (revolutionary) process of defining itself. We meet on an regular, informal basis every other week, but you can find out more on our meetings page. In the future, we plan to hold larger events, so sign up for the mailing lists to find out what's going on. We welcome you to join us at our gatherings and to bring something interesting to view or ponder. Hands-on items (electrical, mechanical, digital, aural, visual, or other) are highly encouraged!"

 

      The Digital Youth Research people recently released a report on how teens used digital media. This got a lot of press (e.g. NY Times, boingboing) because parents are worried about how much time kids spend on social networks and cell phones. It is not so much a scientific study of the effects of digital culture as an anthropological study of what kids actually do. Not to worry, kids and parents, the summary is a good read with practical observations:

- Youth use online media to extend friendships and interests.
- Youth engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online.

and implications:

- Adults should facilitate young people’s engagement with digital media.
- Given the diversity of digital media, it is problematic to develop a standardized set of benchmarks against which to measure young people’s technical and new media literacy.
- In interest-driven participation, adults have an important role to play. [Ed. note: At least we adults aren't completely useless.]
- To stay relevant in the 21st century, education institutions need to keep pace with the rapid changes introduced by digital media.

    Here's a review and pointer to an intriguing book I haven't seen, a comic/manga look at the influential Alan Kay, The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer. 

 

Discrete math background (this is my own page, in process)

"What math topics are not in pre-college cirriculum, topics everyone with an interest in math, computer science, physics or engineering should have seen?"

 

A couple interesting gaming in science articles:

Fixing The Education Digital Disconnect One Video Game At A Time: FAS Launches Immune Attack, an "exciting, fun and fast-moving video game that teaches the critical scientific facts of immunology".

Video Games Can Make Us Creative If Spark Is Right

Video games that energize players and induce a positive mood could also enhance creativity, according to media researchers. However, the study also finds that players who were not highly energized and had a negative mood, registered the highest creativity.

"You need defocused attention for being creative," said S. Shyam Sundar, professor of film, video and media studies at Penn State. "When you have low arousal and are negative, you tend to focus on detail and become more analytical."

Sundar and Elizabeth Hutton, a Penn State graduate student, are trying to understand the value of video games as a vehicle for sparking positive social traits, such as creativity. Fun and games aside, video games are viewed as a serious communication technology. Schools, corporations and even the government are increasingly employing it as a tool in enhancing learning and decision-making.

 

A video showing a clever implentation of a math/geometry technique for warping 2-D images easily and flexibly.

 

Instructions for doing 3D Tracking with Blitz3D (requires a bit of extra hardware), and How to program an Etch-A-Sketch in Blitz3D.

 

Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) is now offering its the three-course Introduction to Computer Science free online:

Programming Methodology
Programming Abstractions
Programming Paradigms

These are the intro programming courses that most Stanford engineering students take.

 

     Here's an interesting comparison of computer graphics techniques for video games, how things have gotten more realistic but not necessarily better:

Evolution of the tree... and 14 other everyday objects we take for granted in videogames

    And XKCD's  ("a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language") most recent comic makes a similar observation: "The most powerful gaming systems in the world still can't match the addictiveness of tiny in-browser Flash games."

 

    I've been thinking about math education (my own mostly, and what's missing in pre-college curriculum), and ran into this timely NY Times blurb, "U.S. Failing to Promote Math Skills, Study Finds"

...

Dr. Feng says that in China math is regarded as an essential skill that everyone should try to develop at some level. Parents in China, he said, view math as parents in the United States do baseball, hockey and soccer.

“Here everybody plays baseball,” Dr. Feng said. “Everybody throws a few balls, regardless of whether you’re good at it, or not. If you don’t play well, it’s O.K. Everybody gives you a few claps. But people don’t treat math that way.”

A big part of the problem, Dr. Mertz and others say, is that while the young math Olympians are wooed by elite colleges like Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as the country’s leading hedge fund firms, they are mostly invisible to the public.

“There is something about the culture in American society today which doesn’t really seem to encourage men or women in mathematics,” said Michael Sipser, the head of M.I.T.’s math department. “Sports achievement gets lots of coverage in the media. Academic achievement gets almost none.”

Ana Caraiani, 23 and a graduate student in math at Harvard, is a two-time Romanian International Olympiad gold medalist. “In Romania, math is not considered as something you need to be a nerd to do,” Ms. Caraiani said. “Math is about being smart. It’s about having intuition. It’s about being creative.”

 

Here's a blog post  that describes EA's plans for Spore expansions, both new "creator" options and gameplay.

"The expansion will give space-faring species the ability to beam down from their ships to explore other worlds and complete missions."

 

    I've run across many short YouTube clips of Richard Feynman, a mathematical physicist and science writer. These clips (each the first of a series) are particularly good:

Feynman: Take the world from another point of view (part 1 of 4)

Feynman: The pleasure of finding things out (part 1 of 5)

    Feynman, although known mostly for his physics work and books, was an early adopter of micro-computers (what we call computers today) and thought a lot about how computation is related to physics.

Spore system requirements 

A coding/cryptography item: Open Source Embroidery and the gendered gift economy, an art project that "brings together programming for embroidery and computing."

Fixing The Education Digital Disconnect One Video Game At A Time: FAS Launches Immune Attack, an "exciting, fun and fast-moving video game that teaches the critical scientific facts of immunology".

Video Games Can Make Us Creative If Spark Is Right

Video games that energize players and induce a positive mood could also enhance creativity, according to media researchers. However, the study also finds that players who were not highly energized and had a negative mood, registered the highest creativity.

"You need defocused attention for being creative," said S. Shyam Sundar, professor of film, video and media studies at Penn State. "When you have low arousal and are negative, you tend to focus on detail and become more analytical."

Sundar and Elizabeth Hutton, a Penn State graduate student, are trying to understand the value of video games as a vehicle for sparking positive social traits, such as creativity. Fun and games aside, video games are viewed as a serious communication technology. Schools, corporations and even the government are increasingly employing it as a tool in enhancing learning and decision-making.
...

"There's this really cool website, Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu), where you can download this programming tool that is a really fun way to program. It is mostly for making games or animations with sprites and scripts."

"Computer Game's High Score Could Earn The Nobel Prize In Medicine", about FoldIt, an effort to use a game platform as a tool to harvest the complex spatio-temporal skills of humans to assist in protien folding optimization, one of the most important computational problems of our times.

Shadow of the Colossus' controls are an exercise in art, about user interfaces and game controls

History of Nintendo character renderings

Representing geometry in Second Life.

Racetrack (game) : Racetrack is a paper and pencil game simulating a car race. As the cars have a certain inertia, one must e.g. slow down before a dangerous bent in the track. Thus, the game requires foresight and planning for successful play.

From a Boing Boing post:

Steven Poole's book on the aesthetics of video games now a free download

Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, January 15, 2008 10:41 AM | permalink

A Boing Boing reader says: "Back in the '90's, Steven Poole wrote an influential book called Trigger Happy, about the history and aesthetics of video games. You can now download it for free, or donate what you want."

Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics.

Trigger Happier

 

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote, video instructions

3-D interactive graphics demo

Videos describing Android (Google phone software platform), example applications and its SDK and architecture.

Game programming wiki

Will Wright, Wikipedia biographical, education and motivations behind game programming.

 

AI and abstract simulation:

 

New Theory Of Visual Computation Reveals How Brain Makes Sense Of Natural Scenes

"In a paper published online by the journal Nature, Lewicki and his graduate student, Yan Karklin, outline their computational model of this visual processing. The model employs an algorithm that analyzes the myriad patterns that compose natural scenes and statistically characterizes those patterns to determine which patterns are most likely associated with each other."

DARPA is funding a cognitive computing initiative: IBM to build brain-like computer.

A friend pointed out to me a group that has studied simple fonts in terms of modeling human perception: how is it we recognize radically different fonts as letters, and what does style have to do with perception. See the "Letter Spirit project" for references. There's a whole book on the topic,  Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. The project is motivated by Douglas Hofstadter who happened to get his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon. If you ever find an interest in math, physics, or theory of mind topics you'll run into his work again, for example in "Godel, Esher, Bach".

Piecing Together The Next Generation Of Cognitive Robots

Academy award for fluid simulation algorithms.

Living with The Sims’ AI: 21 Tricks to Adopt for Your Game: About how object oriented programming is used in The Sim series of programs.

 

Physical and biological simulation:

 

Thieves Winning Online War, Maybe in Your PC (NY Times, 2008-12-06)

"The sophistication of the [malware ] programs has in the last two years begun to give them almost lifelike capabilities. For example, malware programs now infect computers and then routinely use their own antivirus capabilities to not only disable antivirus software but also remove competing malware programs. Recently, Microsoft antimalware researchers disassembled an infecting program and were stunned to discover that it was programmed to turn on the Windows Update feature after it took over the user’s computer. The infection was ensuring that it was protected from other criminal attackers

Academic research on_malware: a brief overview

 

Fluid fire simulation, like Burning Sand with airflow.

 

"Computer Game's High Score Could Earn The Nobel Prize In Medicine", about FoldIt, an effort to use a game platform as a tool to harvest the complex spatio-temporal skills of humans to assist in protein folding optimization, one of the most important computational problems of our times.

 

From a BoingBoing post about artificial life:

"io9 is sponsoring a 'build a lifeform' contest. Entrants will have to design a lifeform that can actually be built in a lab right now, and one winner will get an all-expenses-paid trip to the Synthetic Biology Conference in Hong Kong. We want to encourage mad science and synthetic biology! Judges include MIT's Drew Endy, UC Berkeley's Michael Eisen, and Spore game developer Jason Shankel."

    The Spore people are on the cutting edge of AL -- most artificial life forms are virtual objects. Keep in mind that a prime criteria for building cybernetic life forms is that they have life-like behavior, not that their physical guts look like natural life forms. The Turing Test has for 50 years been the key criteria for AI, and a similar criteria is used for AI. Google is now beta testing Lively, a virtual environment like Second Life, perfect for testing AL forms.

A nice physical AL form, Lord Cthulhu.

 

The story of The Turk (spoiler alert), a famous automata that played and beat Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin at chess. The Mission Impossible mechanical man was a close relative. It has interesting relationships in the history of computing. Deep Blue is the first automata that could have beaten The Turk at chess.

 

 A BBC article about software designed for robots that allows them to "learn" to move through trial and error.  The video of simulated animals learning to walk by flailing around is worth a look. I imagine this is how my SporeBot will learn how to play.

 

Some nice background on the thinking behind Spore: "Will Wright on the origins of 'Spore' ".

 

TED talk, Hod Lipson: Robots that are "self-aware"

Hod Lipson demonstrates a few of his cool little robots, which have the ability to learn, understand themselves and even self-replicate. At the root of this uncanny demo is a deep inquiry into the nature of how humans and living beings learn and evolve, and how we might harness these processes to make things that learn and evolve.

From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm (NY Times, flocking)

Cockroaches Respond to Peer Pressure, Study Suggests (NY Times, robots)

When the Blackboard is Smarter than the Teacher (video, Interactive physics)

Crayon Physics on a tablet PC (video, Interactive physics game)

Processing:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

 

Digital media and art

 

The Bridges Organization: art and mathematics

 

SEED - seeking dialogue between art and science

 

A 4,000 word piece Kevin Kelly wrote in the New York Times Magazine which he called the piece "Screen Fluency"; the Times entitled it "Becoming Screen Literate." Kelly's blog The Technium is always worth reading.

 

A coding/cryptography item: Open Source Embroidery and the gendered gift economy, an art project that "brings together programming for embroidery and computing."

 

The Naked Game:

"What you are seeing is a primitive version of 'Pong', being played by two artificial intelligences, with the entire code governing the mechanics of the game exposed below it, and the variables affecting the mechanics to the right. Furthermore, you can remove lines of code and see the effects in real time.

The motivation behind this piece was to further explore the degree to which video games can be considered 'Art', by using the constituent parts of a well known gaming experience to explore themes of freedom, restriction, and frailty"

 

Jean-Pierre Hébert, an "algorist", and his Mac-Controlled Algorithmic Art

 

Modelling geometry in Second Life

 

"MC Mechanic" by Shane Willis, a self-replication image. Programing is commonly used to design computers and programs, and now there is much interest in home-brew 3-D printers, with the conceptual goal of a machine that can make its own parts, and perhaps a self-replicating machine. This image is a play on a famous self-referencing image of M.C. Escher.

 

NY Times review of Super Mario Galaxy

"...

Like dancing or physical intimacy, a great game can truly be understood only through experience, not words. When reduced to a mere description — “Pass around small bits of laminated card stock in place of money” (poker), or “Roll imprinted cubes and buy fictional properties” (Monopoly) — even the most captivating games can seem impossibly boring.

Likewise, Super Mario Galaxy is really just about jumping, spinning and flying as you try to save the de rigueur kidnapped princess. There’s no rational reason that hopping around giant mushrooms on a purple planet in space should be so much fun, but it is. The best video games, like Mario, Ms. Pac-Man and Space Invaders, have the ability to make the absurd irresistibly seductive. When you do it, it makes all the sense in the world."

 

Quantum computing

   Quantum computers are a whole new type of computers (and new type of computation!) that came out of thinking about physics and computing. While nobody has yet figured out how to make them work on a large scale, in the last few years there has been hopeful signs that the hard problems in making them will be solved.

'Seeing' The Quantum World: How A Quantum Computer Would Work

“The goal of our animated movie about the quantum computer is to convey to a non-expert audience the nature of quantum computation: its power, how it would work, what it would look like,” says Sanders, who also has an article published in the December issue of Physics World on the making of his four-minute animation.

“The animation incorporates state-of-the-art techniques to show the science and the technology in the most accurate and exciting way possible while being true to the underlying principles of quantum computing,” says Sanders.

Visualizing a silicon quantum computer
Barry C Sanders, Lloyd C L Hollenberg, Darran Edmundson and Andrew Edmundson 2008 New J. Phys. 10 125005 (20pp)

Quantum computer operation visualizations

 

Memoirs Of A Qubit: Hybrid Memory Solves Key Problem For Quantum Computing

[    Even if you don't get the gist of quantum computing, the last paragraph of this gets at one of the things I keep yammering on about Friday evenings. In particular, why it is interesting to know how many things can be specified by a particular number of digits/bits (e.g. an 8-bit number can specify 256 colors).]

"All the information in a normal computer is encoded in binary “bits.” A bit is a fundamental unit of information, represented as a 0 or 1 in a normal digital computer. Putting lots of bits together creates a code, which generates or processes information. A quantum bit (qubit), however, could be both 1 and 0 at once. That means a single qubit has twice the power of a normal bit, but once qubits start interacting with each other the processing power increases exponentially. A system of 500 qubits represents 2⁵⁰⁰ different states (which, roughly, is 10 with 151 zeroes after it)." [I've corrected typo errors in the original]

 

Quantum Computers May Be Easier To Build Than Predicted

ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2005)   "A full-scale quantum computer could produce reliable results even if its components performed no better than today's best first-generation prototypes, according to a paper in the March 3 issue in the journal Nature* by a scientist at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). ..."

The new NIST architecture for quantum computing relies on several levels of error checking to ensure the accuracy of quantum bits (qubits). The image above illustrates how qubits are grouped in blocks to form the levels. To implement the architecture with three levels, a series of operations is performed on 36 qubits (bottom row)each one representing either a 1, a 0, or both at once. The operations on the nine sets of qubits produce two reliably accurate qubits (top row). The purple spheres represent qubits that are either used in error detection or in actual computations. The yellow spheres are qubits that are measured to detect or correct errors but are not used in final computations. (Graphic courtesy of National Institute Of Standards And Technology)