Duct Tape And Turing Machines

My day job has been eating most of my time and mental cycles over the last two months, and so work on the AI project has been somewhat slow. I’m going about this in a sort of Tracer Bullet style of development and have been writing simple, extensible prototypes for each module of code. I’ve created very simple rendering and physics engines; the graphics at this point are more or less drawing lines on the screen and the physics engine still needs collision detection and response to be implemented. Not too bad, considering the amount of free time I’ve had lately.

I think it’s going to be very interesting to see how far I can take a pure-Ruby approach here. Ruby is an interpreted language and isn’t exactly speed king among it’s brethern. I’m working with it because it’s beautifully expressive language and the ability to program in a highly functional style is ideal for AI development. The AI routines, which are really the Neat Thing that makes me interested in this project, will be done with Ruby. However, I’ve also written the physics and graphics modules in Ruby: both traditionally pieces of code written in C for pure speed. Programming in Ruby is far more pleasant than memory-leak-and-error prone C/C++ hacking, and I’m curious to see if the simple graphics and physics simulation I have in mind really requires one to code down to the bare metal. I still have a sneaking suspicion that I’ll wind up rewriting these modules in SWIG-wrapped C at some point…