Monday, December 29, 2008

The Year In Review

Today marks one year since I publicly released the source code for BrainWorks, the artificial intelligence rewrite for Quake 3. I've written slightly more than once per week, giving roughly equal time to the technology behind BrainWorks and general philosophical topics related to AI. While I have more things to write about, I feel like I've covered the basics of BrainWorks in sufficient detail. If people want to hear more about a specific algorithmic part of the code, please let me know and I'll write about it. But for this next year I'm going to focus on more abstract topics likes philosophy, ethics, religion, and the meaning of intelligence. And of course there will be computer science related topics like programming style, structure, game design and so on.

I confess I'm been a bit disdainful of blogs. This is primarily because they are so many of them, and they always focus on the same thing: whatever the author finds interesting. The problem is that so few people have interesting thoughts. And now internet fads like Twitter have made it even easier to share information no one cares about. That's the reason I rarely link to other blogs: It's only when they have something profound to say. If I can only regurgitate someone else's ideas rather than writing new thoughts myself, those ideas had better be very meaningful. The only things worth writing are those things worth reading, and 99% of blogs break this rule.

With that in mind, I plan on doing posts once every two weeks rather than once a week. Quality is far more important than quantity, and good posts can take several days (or weeks) of thinking to best articulate. Here's a rundown of some topics I'd like to cover:
  • Reading between the lines (extracting truth from lies)
  • Living as a non-Christian who still has Christian ethics
  • What does it mean to have feelings?
  • Designing games that invoke emotional responses
  • Intellectual consistency (why I'm not offended when people pray for me)
  • Learning how to learn
If you want to hear my opinions on other topics, now is your chance to make your voice heard.

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