Viralink Agent Interface Dev Plan

A viralink agent is a fictional personal assistant.  Interfacing with them is done more by doing than by typing or entering data traditionally.  Agents only communicate with other agents and of course their users.  An agent can only preform it's activity cycle every so often, determined by it's current list of upgrades.  Agents have a set number of upgrade modules they can handle. 

 

Viralink Industries is to be a real metacommunity.  Prefferably there will be no actual website as the hub.  Services, modules, groups, and the like should be the backbone of the project.  The core web presence should be a collection of google search terms, profiles on FOAF sites, blogs, and the like.  At best, a website would provide a place for people to post sightings of viralink agents and operations.

 

The core subversive function of the metacommunity is to inspire members to join new groups and pull as much useful data, guides, resources, links, and more from them as possible and adding them to the central database.  

 

 

Platforms Possible:

Ruby

Drupal / php

ASP.NET

 

{possible SDK sets applicable} = {}

iPhone Application

Local Database Cache

Cache of all practical information database.  Could be a local cache of RSS feeds or the mobile information database.  Local database cache should be synched from a database that is a clone of the web presence database, possibly with a different set of tables.

 

{ Core services - sqlLITE / database} 

Group Mission Status Updates

When a coworker acheives a milestone misson it sends a notifaction.  I like the idea of status notifactions coming via a customizable query building tool, but i'm kinda silly.

{Cocoa Touch - List View}

Locational Scavanger Hunt

Agent upgrades are to be items placed in the physical world.  May come in the form of an access code on a piece of paper in a book, a usb key buried underground, or a hash on a short run of audio cd's.  Device needs to have an easy system that notifies user when they are within proximity, and possibly gives a riddle or clue of it's location (or the location itself and a clue of what to do with the item when it is gotten).

 

{Core Services - Geolocation | Media - OpenAL / openGL? }

Rendered Avatar

Remember the M$ office paperclip?  I want an evil one of those clawing through the phones surface.

{ Media - Open GL | Cocoa - Touch}

 

Locational Audio

Plays audio automatically using positional 3d audio sdk, to emulate the audio coming from physical locations.  Use ICBM / geourl information, or something else, to tag audio origin point.  Also for use in audio confrencing with people who are in proxy at another location, generally by invite.

 

{Core Services - Geolocation | Media - OpenAL }

 

 Locatiaonal Tagging of Locations

Easy entry of locations and summaries w/ images and audio.  Map view of tagged locations with catagories for vies (and something more completed I'm sure).

{Core Services - Geolocation | Media - images  }

Persistant Search View

System of heirchal catagories, metadata terms, and so on no more than 4 deep, that can show all data in the database in a list virw with some combination or another.

 

{Cocoa - List | Core - sqlLITE}

 

Data Posting Agent

Centralized tool for posting data to the internet.  Audio, image, and a wide assortment of text posting catagories can be queued and made available via txt messages, twitter posts, facebook status updates, blog entries, and the like.  

 

{Cocoa - touch| Core - sqlLITE / Networking} 

 

Asset Tool

System to easily search current value of physical items using average values via amazon and ebay and who knows what.  

 

Facebook App

Agent Avatar

Possibly animated rendering of agent that updates at least once a day.  Should represent connection port number and connectivity status.

 

Agent Avatar Stats / Timer

Agent activity countdown timer.   Agent capability and personallity status sheet. 

 

Datafeed

5-Star ranked data items.

 

Uplinked Agent Access Port map

Links to other agents currently connected to this agents Access Port.  Basicview of each connected agents' statii or top feed for the moment, include activity countdown.  Link to the profile of the person who has that agent installed on their site.

 

Data Insertion / Linking

Place for people to post recommended links to data, news, sites, and so on.

 

 

I've been finding a lot of real data games out there.  Especially for economic work and planning.  They use actual real-world real-time data and are used to simulate doing an actual job.  I couldn't find the right place for a book page in the games section so i'm gonna make my list here and someone can post it to the book after we got more.

 

http://www.investopedia.com/Default.aspx?viewed=1

(some java-based currency exchange simulator [cant find link]) 

CNN PBS has a series called The New Heroes that highlights people who actually make a difference and Daryl sent in a game they made about social entrepeneurialism: Build A Socioally Responsible Business:

"So you want to change the world? Play our game and find out if you have what it takes to create a viable business with a social conscience. We'll test your ability to flip a problem on its head and come up with solutions that empower people. Click the Launch button to begin."

 

Good morning... or evening, depending on your personal sleeping pattern.  I'd just like to say hello and thanks for introducing me to your idea. 

 

I've been at odds with how the world is for some time and have done what I can and learned more about what I can do in order to make as much of a positive impact upon the world as I can.

 

I am up tonight because I've spent the evening 'interfacing' with my friends on many subjects.  I say interfacing because, in tandum with the ideals of this website, there was a strong back and forth and interchange of ideas, discussion of values and the personal experiences that formed our beliefs...  all with the intent of bringing each other into a higher level of understanding (even if just philosophically) of ourselves and the world around us.

 

So, high on enlightenment and discovery of new ways of thinking, I couldn't but help but be drawn here to come learn more about Empower Thyself... the idea that IS the direction we are all going...  and the net is the place it's going to happen.

 

I gleefully join the ranks of the Empower Thyself team and look forward to what there is to be done.  Let's do this shit!

 

 

For now, I must attend to matters of a financial nature...  client work awaits. 

 

Thanks for creating a place like this Alex.  It was great meeting you, however briefly, at BarCamp Diego last weekend.   

 

-s 

 

Empowerment's DOSPEC AI constitutes a breakthrough in artificial intelligence technology. It is a DOSPEC because it is a set of requirements for optimizing activity within a defined framework. The candidates for DOSPEC AI will compete and evolve in continuous improvement.

This is our developing documentation of the ideas.

Artificial Intelligence Engine

Character AI is one area where Empowerment will innovate dramatically over previous games.

OpenAI

OpenAI is Sim Empowerment’s revolutionary new artificial intelligence model. It will facilitate multiple overlapping models of AI in a general framework that makes AI programming easy and powerful. Perception and the Sensory Services Model OpenAI handles the sense perceptions and biological systems of the character. Whatever decision-making the character uses, its higher thought runs on top of these “services”.

Modular Decision Making Models

OpenAI abstracts the sensory system to perceive the environment from the decision-making process to guide actions within it.

The limited scope of current AI

Examples of current technology in AI scripts: guards who patrol and investigate noises and can be distracted by various ruses such as thrown pebbles or animal noises. They notice signs of intrusion such as opened doors or damaged property and sound an alarm, summoning reinforcements. This could serve to distract them from other areas as a distraction or it could result in a player becoming surrounded.

The Empowerment Idea-based AI

Ideas are like programs running in the AI’s brain system, interacting with each other and the perceived environment. This will closely mirror the AI used in the roleplay, but with the added challenge of explicitly programming all the possibilities without the subjective human interpretation of roleplaying.

Pathfinding The Planet

Getting around the real world is much more complicated than navigating a simplistic game map. There are regional boundaries to be crossed and multiple forms of transportation to be utilized such as elevators, stairs, bicycles, buses, cars, airplanes, trains and more. The use of transit will depend on well-designed AI ideas governing benefits of each method.

Alex & Nathan notes

LAIN
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain

cyberpunk
autonomous with guns
that aint my robot, that bitch is lyin
we have a surprise for you: the mother is here!
forget anonymized IP, now you need to waer gloves cause that robot will be in forensics when it does something naughty.

collectivize the learning process
latent variable model
correlations

HDR ideas

efficiencies
calculating 4 ideas that are 90%, 80%, 5% and 1%.
Calculate the threshhold ideas fully and randomly pick between 1% and 5% only 6±5% of the time.

Online algorithms
writes its own code

Like TCPIP I'm making the comms protocol that is simpler than NLP
battle chess
Giving ideas their own characters beyond just icons


we're going to be nice till its time not to be nice. -swayze roadhouse

AFTER ACTION REVIEWS
experience

query all past wakeups and factors that led to them
see which correlated most
getting sleep and checking alarm clock
cache that as a new belief

competition between AIs with competetive coding

character class that is AI researcher
you are a 3d character coding your dynamic loop as it is running for your test subject
you need to be able to take omniscience of any person

your cloud
their cloud imperfectly emphathized and knowledge understood like knowing the symbols being used
your reaction may be to the wrong idea entirely


we view ourselves as a component of AI just like the reptilian brain is part of the human brain


obstacle courses

distributed AI for characters that override the core algorithms with better predictions for things under your own control or things that let you control them by agreement


you are competing on the basis of mindshare

you can never get too much of it because there's always a new idea
After you take over the world you get to meet aliens and persuade them.

"Sell vacuum to an alien" —Nathan Rice

Chooinsg a career is like choosing aspirations to explore

Lets say there is a tech tree AI
you learn how to implement or invent preexisting algorithms
until you become smart enough to really write the code by gaining the required skills

So I mentioned in my last podcast that I've begun a twitter for EmpowerThyself.com.

There are some amazing mashups on Programmable Web out there being done and there is a really impressive Twittervision 3D mashup that shows everyone who uses their form to send Twitter API "tweets" including geographic location as talk balloons. How they do the 3D earth spinning I don't know, and the 2D full-screen Google Map version is just as cool.

I see the Drupal system and eventually the game evolving as a narrative mashup hybrid with minigames using this kind of technology long before it becomes a fully immersive 3D game.

Imagine being able to track people all over the world who believe in certain ideas or who are using certain mediums or collaborating on certain campaigns and to have a global map as your "chat window" with speech bubbles popping out of it with chat messages and activity updates. I love it!

"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code."

Click Here To Download Empowerment.TV Podcast Episode 2 in iTunes M4A 3.9MB 16min

Pinging all hands in the concrete trenches of the dystopian front: come out of the cold! We have common ground to build and there's monster truck loads of code to be written.

I'm Alex Peake, founding executive director of The Empowerment, and this is the second edition of empowerment.tv, your backstage pass to changing the world one line of code at a time. This is a developer podcast for developers, roadies and groupies only. If you aren't interested in Empowerment development and you still find this podcast interesting, you may be weird. Might want to have that checked out. You might be coming down with a case of aspiring developeritis.

Drupal Camp LA

I just returned from Drupal Camp LA 2007. That it was a smashing success comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with organizer extrordinaire Crystal Williams. Crystal's barcamps span the globe from Los Angeles to Shanghai, which she organized without speaking Shanghainese, no mean feat.

Check out flickr pictures from the event! This one is of our Community Building panel in which Kirk, Markus and I led a discussion about our communities and the best ways to create social spaces using Drupal. That's me with long hair (for now) on the left. I controlled the projector, so I made sure Empowerment got a lot of screen time!

I went in with two goals: Collaboration and learning. I wanted to find Drupal allies for Empowerment and to develop my own Drupal module development skills.

Collaboration happened in a rocket-assisted fashoin. I met many brilliant folks there to collaborate with, to name a few:

• Markus of OurMedia and several others who live around Santa Barbara. We're planning a regular Drupal Santa Barbara meetup to get the creative juices flowing.
• Scoobesteve from Achieve Internet is interested in collaborating on extending Organic Groups to allow complex relationships like we need for Empowerment's profiling
• Raffy who works extensively on Quiz module which we're eyeing as part of our empowered learning system
• The WorkHabit team who had a lot to say about large-scale deployments and a common interest in developing e-learning systems around Quiz
• Jacob of userpoints maintainer fame got us up to speed on the new features and roadmap for Userpoints and uploaded a parting patch before absconding until further notice to China with his wife.
• I met some folks into game development too.
  
  • Marty of MartysMind and socialsage.com spent years at Sony working on their online games and he's got a lot of good ideas about social economies and fun game design.
  • Ken Caple of Achieve is also an avid gamer and liked the idea of the Empowerment game.
  • Mike suggested we check out Gaia Online.
  • Aaron Stewart described how he came up with a dynamic reusable story engine when younger before doing things like Wayback Machine and turning into a mighty enterprise developer.
• I shared a panel with Markus introduced by Kirk Eisele of CommutyBuildrs where we talked about a lot of ways to make sites social and viral
• I set up a twitter account for empowerthyself.com that will eventually allow us to keep people posted on site updates and things. Anyone feel like assembling a guide to the twittering medium?

Learning happened too.

• I made the most progress by sitting down face-to-face with Jacob as he helped me through the pitfalls of creating my first module which you can see at work already on empowerthyself.com, the icons module.
• I'm now developing the administrative interface for icons.module and this will serve as a stepping stone towards all the other module development we have to do.

Right now we're in a very interesting phase. I am getting as many collaborators and as much hands-on knowledge as I can to assist in the critical development planning for the empowerthyself.com project. Thanks to influxes spurred by Sean Kennedy's Army of Flying Monkeys and Agent, we now have talented folks like TDH and Nihi ready to work on the project. We now also have a huge contingent of professional Drupal experts who want to collaborate on some of our key module developments.

The onus is on me to get the plan hammered out and begin actually doing my job as a project manager so that our development is purposeful and effective. I relish this challenge and I will be getting my first module online and the development plan hammered out in short order.

To everyone who inspires and assists and supports Empowerment, I salute you!

Coming soon: The first empowerment.tv video podcast episode featuring an interview from Burning Man with Fireseed, the founder of Topians. We'll take an in-depth look at his Topians vision and explore how Empowerment can best realize our common goals.

Until next time, empower yourself.

NOTE: Actual podcast audio will be recorded later!

"I was wondering how i could help as a person with only basic computer skills. (with the game that is)"

—Cooper asking me in a private message

There are lots of ways to help wit the game. The starting point, as you guessed, is asking me.

First of all, game development is lots of work for lots of different people working on many things besides the really tough programming and graphics work.