My kind of video gameNovember 19, 2007
I saw a
video on Gizmodo this week that really inspired me. It combines physics simulation with video games with creativity with simplicity. Wow. I would love to take a crack at making a game based on this idea.
DARPA Urban Challenge
November 3, 2007
Today was the big day, November 3, 2007: Eleven teams prepared their autonomous cars for the DARPA Urban Challenge this morning, and one at a time, their vehicles were sent out of the starting gates. It was truly fascinating to watch (via webcast) as the cars and trucks made their way around the urban environment, and in the end, Stanford's entry appears to have been the top dog. Their car behaved in a very balanced, "clean" fashion and it just blew me away watching their VW Passat do so well. Frankly, I wasn't expecting any of the teams to complete the course, let alone do it with confidence. Wow.
This event turned out to be a huge success.
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Can AI write music with a little help?October 30, 2007
Sometimes when I'm sitting at the piano making up a tune, I wonder why a computer couldn't do the same thing... well, not quite. I do appreciate that computers don't know whether something sounds good or not, but they could still be programmed to combine a set of rules/guidelines with randomness to get a new melody, rythm, and harmony. If I were to try this out, I would structure things so that the computer would make something up, and then you as the listener would give it a rating of 1-5 stars. At first it would just be the melody with some basic rythm. Once it had come up with a 5-star melody of a sufficient length, it would add some more rythm to it, and each time it tried something, you would again rate the addition with 1-5 stars. By now you'd have a nice melody, complete with rythm. Time to add in some harmony. This is where there would be lots of opportunity to code in good AI... the complexity/variation is enormous, but if you did a good job, I think it could be a powerful and entertaining way of creating a song, especially for people who know what sounds good when they hear it, but don't know how to make music from scratch. I can imagine a keen 10 year old showing there parent some music that they had made using this approach and it being quite good!
Update: May-08: Apparently Ray Kurzweil did something very similar a few decades back and got lots of press coverage for it :)
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