Early AI attempts
I started experimenting with AI or more precisely neural networks back in middle school after my programming teacher beat me at a Coding Game challenge and then told me he used evolutionary algorithms to do it. After he gave me a quick explanation of what that meant I was hooked and knew this would interest me for the rest of my life.
Now, I must agree that some of the other ways of training neural networks are, for most tasks, way more efficient, and I do find them all very interesting, but I never grew up from the excitement and some deeply rooted interest in self-learning evolutionary systems.
After the initial struggle to program a neuron and wrapping my head around the way they work in neural networks (which was confusing to me at the time), The first AI I programmed was a simple flappy bird AI using just one neuron. To my absolute amazement, it worked! and I confess that I spent a good hour of my time just staring at the birds slowly learning to fly through the gaps.
Here you can see the AI:
As you can see from the example above at this time I also started to learn Processing (yet another thing I use to this day).
After getting over the fact that even I can write something that learns I had a few months. Here are some of my creations from that time:
Self-driving rectangles
these were done using unity. Each "car" has 5 colliders around itself. so there are just five inputs to the neural network. The network then outputs 2 numbers that allow the car to steer and control its speed. As the network scores were calculated from the distance they achieved to drive they were better of taking the longest possible path without colliding with the wall.
Snake AI
These snakes are still to this day one of my favorites. They have 9 inputs telling them if they have anything to either side, if they are facing towards the food, and how far from the food they are. They learn surprisingly fast.
Others
By now I got over this little obsession just a little. I still love creating and playing with these systems, but not every idea is not an AI idea.
Here is the playlist of my other creations:
Source code
Warning the code below contains a lot of grammar mistakes, is uncommented, and is old
Dont judge me :)
Fri Sep 28 2018