We are the children of Khaled's wonderful client, mIRC. He's given us a helluva lot, for something that's free (well, for 30 days or so). While I was sending an email to him in regards to COM objects, I got an automated reply.
In it, it had a link to his personal space on mIRC.com,
www.mirc.com/khaled, and his FAQ. I noticed the section on AL (art. Life)
I already liked AL, but khaled's page had a few links to people who had taken it further than cellular automation (BOIDS, for instance).
I think we could create something rather impressive, and who wouldn't like to see your legions of users turn around and impress you.
The impressive thing:
Why does it take so long to 'train' an 'animal' in artificial life? Because you sit around for a few hundred generations and decide whether its good or bad and finally you get something flashy at 3am in the morning.
Thats because you, as an individual, cannot do what mother nature does (well not as quickly).
I read an article in analog sf&f which gave a solution, of sorts, and I've had the practical implementation in my mind for a bit.
The way to get 1000 things done at once it to get 1000 people to each do one thing at the same time. Well, duh, you say. But how does this reflect on AL?
mIRC supports sockets, thousands of people use mIRC and a lot of them just idle around a bit.
mIRC can deal with graphics, at a low level, with @windows, but it kinda sucks - mIRC has access to DLLs that can be made to use DirectX (which exist, check mIRCscripts.org), and these can handle graphics and 3d animation REALLY REALLY well.
They can also handle high speed math operations a lot faster than $calc can probably hope to do.
So its possible then, to create ANIMATION with 3d geometry, etc etc in mIRC. Its also possible to make a script handle abstract data and send it VIA sockets (UDP, i'll explain why not TCP in a tic).
You could write a mini server in mIRC easily enough and stream data back and forth, etc.
With this, you have a very powerful tool - you could FEASIBLY have people running a script "trade" data in a user friendly manner - you COULD write something like BOIDs, and train your "boids" to fly in intricate patterns - all in mIRC. Then you could get the startup positions and relevant data and stream that to someone else, who can see your boids do their thing with say only 1kb or 2kb of data - which is NOTHING compared to the grand scheme of things.
You could create an AL trading community, run competitions on who can make the best looking cellular automation or who can fly the best formations with boids.
I intend to. Do any of you wish to help. I expect an ugly silence in my inbox, but I'm not fussed - anyway, I have a lot else on my plate before this. I know something like this would most probably get the attetnion of Khaled himself, and what better thing could we do than to give back something to the 'creator'...
PS: Why UDP is better. UDP is a connectionless protocol, which means there is no checking of data integrity, order, or completeness. It means its more or less up to pure chance that your data will get somewhere in one piece or even in the right order. If boids ran off of extremely compressed commands, and some packets got lost or misaligned, THERE IS THE MOST RANDOM ELEMENT WE CAN INTRODUCE - randomness is not easy to do, either - $rand() only produces a number that is NEAR enough to random to serve a purpose. Of course, sometimes you want to get everything intact, so you just have to have parameters which adapt better to circumstances - like DNA being passed from sperm to egg, not all of it always gets there on time, but the stuff that does is lucky - and its children's DNA is luckier, and so forth...
This is all in the planning stage, so your thoughts are welcomed about how to set about doing it.
gekko_dev@hotmail.com 
