Over the last 2-3 weeks I’ve been playing with some AI and building an AI driven app. It is not done or very close to it, but the basic mechanics have been implemented, tweaked, and implemented again several times over. I think they are finally to where I can move on to the next level and I have decided that is going to be learning.

I’ve developed several ideas of how I wanted to make the AI think for themselves, instead of all of them having the same thought structure. Right now, when you watch the demo there really isn’t anything that will differentiate the two teams. They just go after the closest block everytime and when they are all gone they go home.

This needed differentiated and my original thought (and one I will still probably implement at some point) was to add different team types that each have strengths, weaknesses and some sort of special ability that makes it unique. So when presented with situations they would each react in their own way and the result could actually be interesting. Then I went on looking into some different psychological team game theory’s to see if I could present some internal conflict in an interesting way using those, which I could, because there a ton of really interesting studies.

But somehow through all of it I decided that having them learn over multiple executions of the game and become strong, more intelligent beings would be pretty interesting. Basically, evolution, but not to the extent that a new species is born. Just in that their past effects their current stats and way of collecting. So, that’s a little taste of where I plan on going with this.

It’s to wide for my little column, so here’s a link to it: Collectors

Here are each collectors rules right now:

• Find the closest block (in respect to current position)
• Can hold up to 3 blocks at time
• Return to tower with 3 blocks and add them to the tower
• If someone picks up block they are headed towards, immediately find the next closest block
• Once all blocks are gone, return to tower

Pretty simple as you can see. I’ll definitely post here when I make new advances on it, but for now enjoy this. Comment if you like it.