Here is an example of my initial efforts. Its set for 40 pictures at 1 second per picture and doesn’t loop but flicks everything back to the start in quite an impressive (if accidental) manner.

http://www.broken-links.com/2007/05/01/a-mootools-quickstart-guide/

I started a couple of days back a personal project to build a flash puzzle game, which can be found at http://www.srjm.co.uk/puzzle.swf. At this point it only swaps around a single piece to make it easy for me to complete (this still involves no less than 7 moves to get the pieces in place) as I test functions but soon that will change.

AI Coursework

Exercise 4 – Tic Tac Toe AI – Play this simple noughts and crosses game against either an intelligent computer player, or one who choses moves at random.

Exercise 2/3 – A-Life and Genetic Algorithms – Demonstrates the evolution of insect-like organisms through the process of selection and mutation. Start by clicking ‘Initialise’ and then trying to catch 4 parent organisms before clicking ‘Replicate’ and watching the outcome of your selection.

Exercise 1 – Flash Arrays for Vectors and Matrices – A demonstration of the use of vectors and matrices, an important component of AI.

All my AI work can be found at http://www.srjm.co.uk/portfolio/aint204/

4th Exercise

Play against a computer player in a game of tictactoe with AI enabled or disabled.

2nd/3rd Exercise

Developing a selection and mutation system.

View the XML project as it comes along.
To get results, try the search terms ‘silver’ and ‘blue’ for now, but anything else if its there can be searched for.

Finishing the Simulacrum Project

And finally, the last 20 second section of my simulacrum video is complete. Saving it as Quicktime initially created a 1.3GB file, however this was before I set it to compress with mpeg4, giving me a nice 118MB 100% quality file. Still nothing near the size I would reasonably put online though. : (

Simulacrum Online Workbook

Possible Explanation

The musings of someone staring at ACTIONSCRIPT CODE:

Of course, there is a reasonable explanation. There is a time delay between creating a new bee after one dies, and should two die in quick succession, the hive notices that two have died perfectly normally. So the hive creates a new one, and waits to respawn the second. But what happens if another bee dies during this time? The hive counts 2 dead again, creates another, and then at some point one of the new bees dies too quickly, and again the hive is on 2. Three more are created, with a fourth of the new ones still flying about. The extra bee can be accomodated forever because every bee will report when it dies to the hive, that the total number are one down, which to the hive means 3 – 1 = 2 (create a new bee). A seventh has appeared while I typed this, scary…

While watching a trace of the number of bees the hive THINKS there are and the number actually onscreen, it is possible for the hive to say 2 while there are 3.

I’m not sure how to stop this, whether I can, or indeed if I WANT to stop this from happening. And finally, it seems I can’t get it to happen again, so maybe this IS a freak occurrence. I also assume, that the larger the number of bees, the more likely this event is to become.

UPDATE: With patience, it did happen within flash and I watched as the trace of the number said 2 alive, while 3 were flying and therefore it created another, fourth bee.

Thinking about it, the simple solution would be to make sure a bee can’t die faster than the hive can keep count, currently the hive takes 8 seconds to cycle around its activities twice (spawn 2 bees) and also, 8 seconds is the shortest lifespan of a bee. Unfortunately, while this is good for 3 bees, any more and the shortest lifespan will need to be more than 12, 16, 20 etc. The hard solution would be to replace the register of bees in the hive, and replace it with an actual counting of each bee every time it checks to see if any are needed to be spawned.