Been interestested in AI from the moment I realized what a computer could do. My formative highschool years were spent playing EverQuest and I consider my first successful programming endevor was a series of crude AI agents to control the many characters I often played simulataniously. My dream became to build Good AI and a game around it, as it seemed so easy at the time. The confusing experience of being a human got in the way and that dream was never realized for all of the worst reasons - yet here we are 20 years later and still no one has done it. Now I am in my early 30s and fully transitioned into that “grown up” perspective where dreams reveal themselves as the ugly piles of complexities that once seemed so obtainable. I made my way out of the darkest parts of humanity and am seeing what is left of the teenager who was just too lazy to write enough down. This seems like a barebones (as needed) plan for creating a virtual world where AI can flourish. I am just wondering where the game at.
Hi Miles! Hey have you ever played X-COM? The original form the mid 90’s used AI to control aliens you battle in turn-based game play. Pretty awesome especially at the time. Now there’s an “open xcom” project where you can manipulate and rewrite stuff to the original game to expand it. Check it out if you get bored maybe you’d get a kick out of it.
I had a few friends that wouldnt stop raving about how great xcom was, but I went with StarCraft as the mid 90s strategy game phase I went through - it also has a dev kit now and I think it’s DeepMind’s current Target after mastering Go. I wish had more time and discipline to continue my research into the multi agent problem, but ever since joining this CV startup, I have been giving them 100% of my attention to getting to the bleeding edge of the field. It kind of works out because I am learning a lot of general methodologies and infrastructure stuff that I know will be able to be generalized. Embedding spaces is what it all comes down to, regardless of what sort of information you are dealing with. We are moving into more video based analysis, so I am going to get some hands on experience with RNN and all the intricacies of temporality.
I won’t pretend to be smart enough to understand most of what you said but yea! Rock on! Lol. I never played StarCraft but I know what you’re talking about. That’s cool you knew about xcom. Yea, things will get interesting. What a time to be alive!