Hap Hazardo was a miner

This week on the Dead of the Dead: more thinking and planning nice incentives to keep playing and getting your friends involved. Sometimes it's good to stop coding for a while and actually think what kind of experience are you trying to offer.

I've been grinding Left 4 Dead 2 quite a lot last week, it was on steam sale and I picked it up as my friend recommended it. Heaps of fun, got quite a few ideas for good collective interaction between many players. All that stuff is crystallizing now to see a light of day on Dedd later. It's amazing how the brain works..

I did a bit of bot coding again, our game has bots that tutor new players and bots with ai that you can play against. I've been toying with bots for years and years now, my first bots were and excercise of entities that played out the entire script of the Big Lebowski. I think I could easily win a Big Lebowski dialogue trivia competition now after seeing the text flow a gazillion times on the debugger console. Not to mention my 10+ viewings of the actual Cohen 'masterpiece'. =)

Last weeks bot I called Silverbrain. It was born out from a piece of code a few years back that tried to be the universal catalogue of Everything, also called Silverbrain. Silverbrain was based on an idea that came thru with this crazy Italian guy Alberto who had the most horrible looking website about script programming with pictures of sexy ladies and essays of medieval art, politics and all kinds of subject matter that one would not associate with programming at all. Actually I think a lot of people were totally put off by the site layout and the bizarre whirlwind of information that swirled around : A mad psychedelia of Everything.

Alberto's programming shit was really tight though, one of his articles about creating artificial neurons struck my eye and I wrote my own implementation that became Silverbrain, an information pulling, linking, endlessly recursing and browser crashing beast that threw interesting things on the screen.

Of course I just had to ditch that one and from time and time, rebuild it as Silverbrain mkII or something. This weekends iteration turned out quite nicely and I might throw it in the game as a fun little extra. Silverbrain groks many different kinds of -isms and tracks people and things that had something to do with the social and artistic movements of the past century. You want to know who was  involved with the 60's counterculture? Silverbrain 'knows'. What was the relation of French surrealist painters to autonomism and dadaists? Silverbrain produces output for you.

I think there's nothing quite like Silverbrain on the net unless Alberto has made one already and is keeping it a secret. Might even put it online as a separate entity.

Inside Silverbrains mind is like a conspiracy theorist's living room with newspaper clippings, half eaten pizza, old photographs and pieces of red string going from one point to another in an endless recursion. Too bad I've got some real life stuff to work on instead of just wasting my life building this personal Merzbau. Data can be media too, people.