Intelligent Agents......

[Richard MacLemale]

I apologize in advance for the length of my post!

I've been following the AI discussion with GREAT interest.  I've always
wanted to write some server based software using metacard that would control
a simulation that teams of 8 people on separate computers on a network would
interact with.  AI is not necessarily mandatory but the more complex the
program, the cooler the simulation would be.

Specifically, this:  Years ago, when I was a 5th grade teacher, we took our
kids to the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, FL (MOSI) and they had
a space ship simulator - the kids dressed up in pseudo astronaut type
outfits, like flight suits, that fit on over their clothes, and then they
went into this room that looked like the bridge on the Enterprise, in the
sense that it had different workstations that did different things.  Kids
paired up and they wore headphones with microphones.  Each station had a set
of directions... One station operated a robotic arm that was "outside the
spaceship" and you could see it out the "window" (really it was in a closet
set up to look like the surface of the moon, with a robotic arm.  Instead of
a closet door, there was a door with a window in it, and the door was worked
into the wall so that you didn't know it was a "door.")  Each station did
something different, and all stations had controls and monitors.  Over your
headphones, "mission control" would tell you to do certain tasks, and the
card instructions told you how to do them.  You and your partner had to
accomplish the tasks.  It was AWESOME.  It was also expensive.  At the time,
pretty much all of the stations were Apple IIGS computers.  And "mission
control" was a separate room, manned by 4 people - they'd be talking to the
teams in their mics and switching between teams and they used several
Macintosh computers to monitor the progress of the teams.  And those 4
people had to be on their toes, obviously, because the kids would do
unpredictable things - mistakes they had not anticipated.

It left a huge, lasting impression on me, because it was educational and it
was extremely fun!  It was learning and playing and acting and just about
the coolest thing I'd ever seen as a teacher.  I thought about how cool it
would be to be able to put something like that together, but obviously it
was too expensive.

Fast forward to now.  For a couple of years I've thought about how cool it
would be to write software that would do something similar to what MOSI had.
On one level, it could be done purely as entertainment - get 6 people on six
computers in one lab, get six people on six computers in another lab, and
they're each on a "ship."  Naturally they'd do battle, hiding from each
other behind planets, and whatnot.  Each station would have directions, and
each team would have a "Captain."  To be a captain, you'd need to
participate in each position at least once and achieve a minimum "score" -
the server program would track the response time and decision making of each
person and assign a score for that position.  The person with the highest
score would be the Captain, though you could work out some other system.
The server program would throw in random elements like suddenly appearing
hostile ships and whatnot.  This would be an OUTSTANDING project for some of
our seniors to put together - writing the code, designing the stations,
filming video to be triggered by the server program when a hostile ship
shows up out of nowhere (You know, wearing an alien mask and screaming "We
will DESTROY your SHIP into the camera.)  What could be more fun?

OR I could see writing something more like the original MOSI simulator, and
selling a "kit" with the software installers for Mac or Windows.  That would
make money but would not be as much fun.

Anyway, Alain's post got me thinking of how the server software might
operate...  Great discussion here.  I think everything I stated above could
be done in MetaCard (or Revolution.)

-- 
:)
Richard MacLemale
Network Administrator
J. W. Mitchell High School