Journal

I have been thinking about what to do next. So far, I have been following up on one question after another and never really solidifying where I have been. Part of it has been due to my poor research skills, a better approach would be to write and present my thoughts as I go instead of keeping it all in my head where, like a house of cards, it gets increasingly difficult to keep up.

So this is what I am thinking, a few of the things that would be a good idea to do would be to sketch out schedule, polish my literature survey, skim through my PhD guide and look into implementation details such as available tools.

A little while back, I did look into a few tools but nothing really came out of it. I suspect that papers on evolutionary emergent communication such as Cangelosi (2001) as well as Cangelosi and Harnad (2002) used tools such as MATLAB. I also suspect that other papers on embodied artificial intelligence used their own tools.

The following address is to research done by A. Cangelosi.

http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/soc/staff/angelo/angelo_pubs.htm

Cangelosi et al. (2007) used the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) to simulate physics. Right now, I am more interested in what tool Cangelosi and other researchers to simulate neural networks.

My quick search for neural network simulators returned a number of candidates. I do prefer neural network libraries that are compatible with game engines.

An ONLAMP page at the following address contains a few ideas about neural networks for games. The ideas are from the authors of "AI for Game Developers," D. M. Bourg and G. Seemann.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/09/30/AIforGameDev.html

The super cool thing is that the book is also available at Google Books. Having this much awesome information available to me makes me feel spoilt and a tad bit evil.

Please note that I feel that neural networks need substantial additional augmentation in order to be truly useful.

Unfortunately, "AI for Game Developers" on Google Books lacks a large number of relevant pages. I will need to get the book to see how they implemented their neural networks and with what libraries.

Okay, I was looking at the provided example code for the book and saw that the authors wrote their own neural network class. While this is useful, I would prefer a more sophisticated solution such as MATLAB because of features that help analysis such as simply plotting graphs. This may be a bit too much to ask.

I did hear that MATLAB might be able to export code for a neural network after it has received specifications. This code can then link with game engine code.

I compiled and ran the example neural network program. I am not sure of what I was seeing because I have not read the related chapter. I am not sure of how much further to follow this track.

Other ideas include using Octave, Python and FANN. I do like the look of FANN because it is free, open source, portable and fast.

I think it would be a good idea to revisit the other software I looked at earlier and then quickly choose one to prototype some ideas.