"Google will have an API Google will offer an API! I've known about this for a while, but I was sworn to secrecy. Now that it's hit Slashdot, though, I think all bets are off. Can't wait to see what apps people build on top of Google's citation database.LinkDiscuss posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:25"
"Google is working on a SOAP-based API. We've already verified that Frontier and Radio work with it. I'm not sure how much more I can say about this at this time."
This sounds like it could be interesting. Radio and Google communication. But, what does it mean to the average Joe like myself?
"The more artificial an object is, the more arbitrary the restrictions are on its movements, the simpler the rules governing the play, the more powerful a game seems to become. A game establishes its own world."
Chapter 5 "Control Artist" of Steve Johnson's Emergence spends a good amount of time discussing this very topic. He uses Wil Wright of Sim-x fame as well as other software engineers as examples to describe a defining aspect of emergent intelligence - that it is 'controlled' not by a central or supreme authority, but instead at the edges.
...Early in the design of The Sims, Wright recognized that his virtual people would need a certain amount of autonomy for the game to be fun, and so he and his team began developing a set of artificial-intelligence routines that would allow the Sims to think for themselves. That AI became the basis for the character's 'free-will,' but after a year of work, the designers found that they'd been too successful in bringing the Sims to life.
"One of our biggest problems here was that our AI was too smart," Wright says now. "The characters chose whichever action would maximise their happiness at any given moment. The problem is that they're usually much better at this than the player"
Arbitrary restrictions were applied to curb this problem. Simplifying the world of the Sims.
"...First we made them focus on immediate gratification rather than long-term goals...Second, we gave their personality a very heavy weight on their decisions...A very neat Sim will pick up spend way too much time picking up - even after other Sims..."
"...Wright made their [the Sims] decisions local ones and made the rules that governed their behavior more intransigent. For the emergent system of the game to work,...[he] had to make the Sims more like ants than people."
The power of the game then comes in the form of control or in this case dumbing down of the AI at work behind the scenes.
"Following the tradition of showing screen shots of work in progress, here's a snap of the user interface of the new shortcuts stuff I'm doing for Radio. And a new tradition, you can follow the work on my outline. We move quickly and we do it openly. It's a zig to the patent-based software industry's zag. As we invent, the "lab notebook" is open. Other developers can see what we do and how we do it."
Looks like Dave is putting an interface to editing the Glossary locally. This is really such a nice feature - your own personal Smart Tags.
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