I am going to Romania! Yup, early next year, if all goes according to plan (and I am going to really try to make things go according to plan!), I am going to visit my girlfriend in Romania. The plan was for her to visit me, but understandably she is hesitant to come to South Africa. Also her parents prefer that I go to visit her, and also to meet them. They don’t want their daughter to go to another country to some guy they have never met. I would have felt the same.

So, I am going to Romania. Meeting the parents-in-law? Hehe. Maybe.

For taking my artificial intelligence into the third dimension, I think I am going to go with the Open Dynamics Engine.

I would like to thank all the friendly people on the VS2010 team who corresponded with me, and who pointed me to the SmartTags feature of Visual Studio 2010. Every time I learn something new about the upcoming VS2010 I am amazed. But you have created a problem for yourself: how can you ever improve on the awesomeness that is Visual Studio 2010?

Scott Guthrie, Chris Dias, Chris Ganger – thank you very much for the friendly help. Why is Microsoft the king of software companies on the planet? Quite simply, because it is the best.

Onto something else – may I suggest, for future OS releases, that you make an Express edition of Visual Studio available as part of the normal Windows distribution? This will encourage more people to start developing.

Anyway – thanks for your help and suggestions!

Some friends at work are really amazing. That is all I will say. They know who they are.

Do you know how bad it is to have a girlfriend who lives in another country, who you believe is the most amazing person you have ever met, who you can only talk to over the phone but, from those conversations, know that this is probably the girl you want to marry? No it is not nice. It is more than that, it is a sort of hell. To actually have ‘met’ that special someone – but you are separated by thousands of kilometers? And then, to not have the money to even buy a plane ticket to go to visit, or to let her come to visit you? But to miss her every day? And to call her every day to talk to her, but that only makes you feel better for the duration of the telephone conversation, because as soon as you put down the phone, you are alone again?

It is a kind of hell, indeed.

Howdy peoples!

I have googled for physics engines I could use (as per my previous post), and I found two candidates that look quite promising. The one is SPE (Simple Physics Engine – www.spehome.com) and the other is ODE (Open Dynamics Engine – http://www.ode.org). Both are written in C++, but I can just write wrapper classes in C#.

Hi. I am urgently looking for a skilled software engineer to help me with my AGI project. However the work I need to be done is not related to artificial intelligence per se. I have developed the neural network framework, but what I need now is to develop implementations that showcase the abilities of my neural networks.

What I need is a .NET physics/rigid-body library that I can use as a basis for constructing 3-dimentional ‘body’ data for virtual agents, that will be controlled by my neural networks. In short, I want a ‘black-box’ implementation of simple physical concepts such as ‘rod’ and ‘joint’ and ‘muscle’ that exist in 3D space. Then using these primitives, I can construct a virtual creature. Using an interop layer that I will develop myself, I can then interface my Farve system with this physics system to create behaving and learning virtual creatures.

See, for example, the work of my favourite professor , Prof Fred Delcomyn. http://www.life.illinois.edu/delcomyn/

I want to be able to use my neural network, in conjunction with your physics engine assembly, to create, for now, a ‘cockroach’ that exists and behaves in 3D space.

I will take care of the rendering. I just want the physics to be done, because my knowledge in this area is much too limited to do it myself.

Please, if you have a working knowledge of basic physics, and you can help, please get in touch! Thank you.

For source control (change tracking and versioning) I recommend the free TortoiseSVN. Use it, dont use it It is what I use for my personal development and I find it does the job well.

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

A new incarnation of my Artificial General Intelligence framework, Farve (‘Lorena’ release) is in progress! I am developing this new system in Visual Studio 2010 (Beta 2) using the .NET Framework version 4.

Sometimes, when I stand back a bit and look at how my AI system is evolving, what it has become, I am proud, I am amazed. Sometimes, I am even a little bit afraid. That is just stupid I know, but still – such power, such beauty, really… it is wonderful. Amazing. I have been working on this for years, studying and working for years, and to see it actually come together. It is a powerful emotion. I am not afraid of the AI per se. But, I am afraid for being the one who is creating something with such potential. Sometimes, I look at my code, and I realize that I understand each bit, but not the system as a whole. It is too big. Too complex.

It is beautiful.

I was at the Shido ‘dojo’ last evening (although I don’t think they call it a dojo). It was quite impressive. I must say, some of the guys there seemed really tough. One guy broke his nose – his nose bled, but from the top, not the bottom.

I decided to join. But then last night I reconsidered. It costs R700 to join and each month it is R400. That is not expensive – in fact, for the amount of training you get, it is cheap. But I realized that, as per a previous post, I can spend that money, or I can save it. So I will save it. It will enable me to let my girlfriend from Romania visit me that much sooner.

I will train on my own.

Hey Karel – how is your Kung-Fu training going?