Hi Everyone,
I’ve completed my chat bot experiments in Excel. What an eye opener. Overall it was difficult, but I came up with some clever little techniques.  I didn’t follow through on all the experiments. I was satisfied with what I saw and decided not to invest more time programming in VBA.

To move on to Walter, a bot who lives and interacts with the virtual world that is synchronized to the real world, I need to learn how to do some things a lot better. For the moment I’m setting aside NLP to focus on something that is calling for my attention.  My goals for building a better world for Walter are:

1) Practice and develop my C++ skills (intermediate and some advanced stuff). I’m pretty good but I think my 2D engine can be a lot better by taking advantage of the rich set or resources available in the language, STL, and Boost.

2) Physics Engine.  In order to interact Walter must be able to avoid bumping into things, grab items, react to external (virtual) forces, etc.  I’ve done my own physics work but never implemented a proper engine.  I’m interested in using Box2D.

3) Scripting Interface.  I can load data files (CSV and INI) but I’ve never used a scripting language to reduce the the endless cycle of writing code, compiling, and testing.  I’m interested in Lua or Angelscript.

4) AI - Artificial Intelligence. My AI routines have been somewhat basic. I’ve used a sequence of bot states to move Walter about but it was too simple.  I need to design and test very levels of AI such that Walter can seem natural, but the animals can behave like animals in his world.  Also interested in event driven speech, so Walter can express himself more naturally.  I’m including speech recognition in this section because it would be interesting to have Walter respond to voice commands or questions.

Having dropped 25 pounds recently and shifting my diet away from tasty greasy and salty food, to mostly veggies and fruits of the past 10 weeks, I’ve got a lot more energy now.  The organic garden in our backyard has served me as a good source of fuel. I want to seize upon that and work on a project to learn these various bits above.

To that end, I’m working with one of my sons to design and build a RTS (Real Time Strategy) game over the course of the year. He’s the game play pro and talented musician.  I will take my existing game (simulation) engine and attempt to improve it by adding a physics engine, scripting, and sophisticated AI capability. Voice commands are a possibility.

I’ve been working on a specification, or a GDD - Game Design Document.  I’ll be documenting this on another forum where game development fits…doesn’t quite fit Chatbots.org. =) I’ll come back and post a link when I’ve got the thread established.

As always I’ll be keeping tabs on this site and the quest to win the Loebner Prize. I do read the emails that are automatically sent my way.

I’ve updated my “I love me page” with all of my games and editors at games.chuckbolin.com

Regards,
Chuck

Chuck,
you should think about using JavaScript as your scripting language.

Projects that may be interesting if you want to build everything yourself.
Google’s V8 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)
and
NodeJS - http://nodejs.org/
Node might act as a server and synchronizer to the real world.

If you are more interested in just building the game and AI you might look at Unity3d - http://unity3d.com/unity/

Having dropped 25 pounds recently and shifting my diet away from tasty greasy and salty food, to mostly veggies and fruits of the past 10 weeks, I’ve got a lot more energy now.  The organic garden in our backyard has served me as a good source of fuel.

11 kg in 10 weeks, that’s not bad. Hope that diet has a bit of taste left

Good luck in your endeavors, Chuck! I look forward to seeing Walter in his new and improved world.

HI Chuck, thanks for the update (missing your here, actually )

Hi Everyone,
Thanks for the kind thoughts and the links on scripting.

My son graduates from flight training in the Air Force next month. I’m hoping to slim down enough to make somewhat of a respectable impression.=) He hasn’t seen me in about 6 years. Then of course continuing to lose a few more pounds and keeping it off.  I’ve made significant changes to my diet (mostly veggies) and walking about 15000 or more steps each day.

Bought a new PC this week with near ‘infinite’ hard drive capacity. My first Atari 1040 has 0 hard drive capacity. Pretty awesome. I even bought me a very nice 32” computer monitor. Incredible!  I can’t begin to explain how many files I can have open…and how productive this seems to be.

Regarding the game, I’ve downloaded a 2D physics engine called ‘Box2D’. I’ve managed to create and compile a simple program. I’m delving through the documentation this evening. I’ll need to tie this to my game framework.  The test program for this physics capability is really neat.  I can see the possibility of realistic interaction in Walter’s world. This was going to be extremely difficult.

Regards,
Chuck

Chuck Bolin - May 21, 2011:

My son graduates from flight training in the Air Force next month. I’m hoping to slim down enough to make somewhat of a respectable impression.=) He hasn’t seen me in about 6 years. Then of course continuing to lose a few more pounds and keeping it off.  I’ve made significant changes to my diet (mostly veggies) and walking about 15000 or more steps each day.

Congrats to your son. And to yourself—it’s tough to make big diet changes and stick with it.

Chuck Bolin - May 21, 2011:

Incredible!  I can’t begin to explain how many files I can have open…and how productive this seems to be.

Great stuff, Chuck! I, to, wish to extend congratulations to both you and your son for your respective achievements! May you both continue to reap the benefits from your efforts for a long, long time to come.

When I first hooked up a large (21”, at the time) monitor to my system, I was overjoyed at the amount of “real estate” available to me for my various projects and games. Then I moved to a two monitor setup, and I got spoiled. These days, I have the following monitors hooked up:

1.) Dell 19” LCD Flat Panel Monitor
2.) Dell 22” Wide Screen LCD Monitor
3.) Vizio 32” LED HD Television 1080p HDMI

They look like this:

http://www.geekcavecreations.com/images/HPIM1067.JPG

The vast majority of the work I do is on the smallest monitor, which is barely visible, to the right of the case. Go figure. The 32” is great for games, and for working with graphics, but since it’s a TV, and not a monitor, the pixel size is too great to make reading text easy, or even painless. :(