Ruben’s blog

In an attempt to kickstart my graduation-project I decided to throw together another AI-experiment (I'll post something about it later), after staring out of the window with a blank glare for some time I figured I'd need a pathfinder algorithm so I sat down and wrote/typed it down.

The algorithm is pretty simple in essence -- it starts at one point, looks for connected/surrounding points, picks one at random, and repeats these steps until it reaches the destination-point (success) or comes across its own trail (failure). In the latter case it'll start all over again from square 1, so to speak .

Check it out, when the destination-point has been found click the demo to start over.

Last week at FITC Amsterdam I attended Colin Moock's session about the next version of ECMAScript. As ECMAScript is the language standard on which Actionscript is (somewhat loosely) based, this means that most proposed features for ECMAScript 4.0 will also be in Actionscript 4.0 (hence the name "Actionscript 4??"). Do note that most of the proposals are still just that.

Here's a quick summary:

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Oh man this was just too awesome! Today was the second day of FITC Amsterdam and it just got even better than it already was.
Right now I'm still rushing on adrenaline and waiting for fatigue to kick in, so here's just a little overview, more lenghty reviews will follow in the next few days..

Having overslept I walked into today's first presentation not before halfway through, and honestly I instantly regretted not having been on time. Koen de Weggheleire did a really good job entertaining the audience (which still seemed kind of sleepy and reluctant with applauding) with his presentation about bitmap-manipulation. Especially the fly-smashing part really got me smiling.

The rest of the day was really just one big bunch of inspiration, seeing some really beautiful artwork by Jared Tarbell (here are the pieces he showed) and also Erik Natzke.
Also really mind-blowing was all of the audio-stuff Andre Michelle had to show (but more about that later).

In my opinion the best part of today was James Paterson's (most inspiring) presentation. I was already familiar with the work he's done for VH1 and as it turns out I had already come across his website a couple of years ago, so seeing him show off all of his insanely awesome animations, characters and drawings was althemore exciting/interesting.

Yes I am. Jesse from Actionscript.org was kind enough to hook me up with some tickets for FITC Amsterdam 2008, this is awesome.

I'm particularly excited about getting to see Joshua Davis talk, I remember being baffled when I first saw his work. Also, I'm very curious as to what Erik Natzke will be talking about, but I guess I'll find out tomorrow..

I'll try to keep you guys posted over the course of the next two days.

When some time ago I was bored I started this little AI experimental project (Actionscript-only, no Flex), tonight I had some time on my hands and decided to finish it.

The main reason behind this was to get a grasp of the utter basics of AI. Alongside that I also thought it'd be cool to try to have classes work with as little knowledge as possible about other classes. Do mind that this is not an example of best-practices, merely a little experiment of mine.

In this project is that there are three different types of organisms; rock (blue), paper (red) and scissors (green). Naturally if a paper encounters scissors then paper dies. If two organisms of the same type (i.e. two papers) encounter eachother, another organism of the same type will be born.

Check it out by clicking the image below, source-code is available as well. You can toggle the visualisation of the grid by hitting the space-bar.

Oh, and sorry for being too lazy to think of a clever name