Mechanical AI Made In LittleBigPlanet

Laurens writes "Despite slow sales of LittleBigPlanet in the USA, you might have heard of the calculator made within the game, but now that has been topped. I found a fully-functioning AI machine which plays Tic-Tac-Toe against the player. Considering that you can't actually program in LBP, this feat is impressive; it is a machine which has mechanical AND and OR ports made of pistons and proximity detectors, a physically moving Program Counter, and hundreds of wires. The level is called 'Tic Tac Toe' and is by author Cristel." Another player created a similarly amazing level that is a recreation of John Conway's Game of Life.

Comments

The most powerful...

[binaryspiral]

I find it very interesting, and somewhat ironic, that the most powerful home gaming console in history has people programing in mechanical gates.

Very cool indeed.

Re:The most powerful...

[Antity-H]

It seems the irony of using an amazingly powerful digital computer to emulate a simple mechanical computer is completely lost on you ...

In the Future...

[wasmoke]

I can see it now:
Posted by JConnor on April 21, 2011, @08:45PM
Another Mechanical AI Made In LittleBigPlanet
John writes
"This new AI, playfully named Skynet, was created to help students in Africa reach for the sky and learn to play checkers. Support this effort by downloading the fun new application."

Ahh, Youtube comments

[Protonk]

They make me feel better about the level of discourse here at /.

Re:Is anyone playing this game?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Look up at the top of the page and read the smaller words just to the right of the site name. "News for nerds"

You might be a gamer, and after looking at your comment history I note that you're even a tech. But if you don't see the appeal in making things like this, then you aren't a nerd.

Re:Is anyone playing this game?

[Vectronic]

Some people like to produce, others, like yourself, just suck.

And still others, really enjoy seeing how complicated of a maze they can get out of, making a mod for Fallout, or GTA is fairly easy in comparison, and from another perspective its too infinite, a lot of people like a small, finite, "controlled experiments", where the results are in direct relation to the input, whereas Fallout/GTA/et al, generally have a point and click type design.

Same reason why some of use will fire up an IDE and program a utility we need, and others will just go Google for one they can download, sometimes the means is more enjoyable than the ends.

And no I didnt forget to check Post Anonymously.

They could take this a huge step further

[StreetStealth]

The minor resurgence of interest in mechanical computers brought about by LBP is pretty cool, but I think Media Molecule could really latch onto this and offer some excellent DLC for the advanced users.

Mechanical computers are fun to watch, but they require lots of level space as well as complex physics simulation to perform even the most basic operations. Here's where an expansion pack could pick this trend up and run with it: Add the ability to build little breadboards with transistors. Now there's no physics overhead, and just imagine the stuff you could wire up!

Re:They could take this a huge step further

[AKAImBatman]

Here's where an expansion pack could pick this trend up and run with it: Add the ability to build little breadboards with transistors. Now there's no physics overhead, and just imagine the stuff you could wire up!

That would remove all the charm of these hacks. What's really cool about such mechanical machines is that they demonstrate computer science in a visual manner. Even we professionals who know that computers != electronics are wowed to death when we see a mechanical computer large enough to watch its operation and see its inner workings. (Even if it is virtual.) Imagine what it's like for those not familiar with computer science? Such a massive computational machine is beyond their belief, even if it performs a simple task. It hearkens back to 60's scifi where computers are monstrously large creations that have incredible brain power. It's pretty cool stuff!

Replace all the mechanics and physics with a few virtual circuit boards and you remove all the charm. The levels stop being machines of wonder and go straight back to their black boxes. To the average user, a circuit board in the game is nothing but a fancy script.

Re:They could take this a huge step further

[_xeno_]

No. That involves gears. These mechanical computers don't use gears, and there's a good reason for that - the physics simulation doesn't quite work for gears.

The way it works is that when the game has decided that an object has been sufficiently crushed by another object, it just deletes it in a puff of smoke. (It's a kind of neat effect.) Creating gears, sadly, causes them to crush each other as the game tries to figure out how to make them spin. They have pre-crafted gears and I tried to make a simple set of three gears turned by giving power to one gear - and it worked for like three seconds before the game decided one of the gears had been crushed and deleted it.

For added nuisance, it's next to impossible to "anchor" the gears dead-center since you're using a PS3 controller. You can turn on a grid to try and help you, but it doesn't help that much.

Re:They could take this a huge step further

[fictionpuss]

You can get gears to work reliably if you scale them all down by one grid unit to allow centering. If you scale them by different amounts though, the teeth will grind in that effect you mentioned.

Wire wrap, the headache.

[Animats]

Brings back memories of wiring up 7400 series TTL gates with a wire-wrap gun. I wonder how they developed the thing. It would be amusing to write a back-end for a VHDL compiler or a logic simulator to generate logic in LittleBigMan devices. Probably easier than trying to debug the thing inside the game.

Danny Hillis once made a Tic-tac-toe machine out of Tinkertoys and string. I've seen the thing. I'm amazed that it worked. He once told me that it didn't work very well.

Re:Is anyone playing this game?

[Tokerat]

They finally start making video games where you're free to make whatever you want, like a Mario Paint you can walk around in, like what we all wanted when we where kids...

...and you're SHITTING on it?

You, sir, are no gamer. No flame intended, but you'd rather be part of an interactive movie than play a game. This is a game for real gamers.

Not everyone knows how to mod Half-Life 2, but anyone can pick up LBP.

Re:Hooray for Life

[ais523]

It's impossible to fit in a Turing-complete pattern without infinite space; any finite amount of space is not enough. Although the pattern itself could be finitely large, it would try to modify things outside its own location as part of its processing. (Access to an infinite amount of memory is one of the things required for Turing-completeness; that's why the term "bounded-storage machine" exists, referring to something like a real-world computer which is Turing-complete except for limits on its storage.)