I've always been somewhat intrigued by The Simpsons episode where Lisa creates a tiny civilisation in a peetree dish that evolve and adapt which has always inspired me to model something similar in a computer environment. Ofcourse it is an unrealistic goal so far but also somewhat of a dream. I was wondering however if say I created some program with a creature that began to say experiment and start carving a wheel noticing it is good for moving things etc then began to abstract the different parts of a car is there a way at runtime that my little creature friend could make a little script himself that described his new invention as a class then it be posted to the application to load and it now becomes a new item for the creature to create. I've seen scripting languages etc but is there some way to compile code at runtime for my creature to use is what I'm asking I suppose. I dare say I will ever get to that level of competency because AI is such a huge field but I would appreciate your thoughts on the idea I suppose and if you are in the AI field what's a good place to begin learning it I suppose. Like how did you all get started? Programming robots I guess? Thanks for the read Jemburula

Yeah, I have experimented a little bit in AI but kind of wandered off the path. It was supposed to be a program called ArchI that was just Megaman sprites I put into an SDL app. He got hungry and went to search for food, not really search jsut move along the screen till he found some. I also attempted to get him to remember times when he was "happy" then when elemental forces such as rain came he would go back to a place he had been "happy" and because rain made him "unhappy" I hoped it would turn out he walked underneath shelter :P but as I said I got taken away with the actual learning of SDL so didn't get to implement much of that.

Yeah may as well, it is the holidays after all :) I've been thinking and would like to get to know a few other people like myself exploring AI for the first time (or even if you do have great experience) so add me to MSN if you so please and we can just bounce ideas off each other. My MSN is Jemburula@hotmail.com

My good computer is currently broken because I foolishly took out the heatsink to give it a good clean and I think I put the processor back in properly but now the screen doesn't post so it is being fixed. But I found an old version of ArchI that hasn't got much implemented other than graphics and I'm not even sure if it works as I don't have a compiler on this PC but you might like to see the code: http://members.iinet.com.au/~jpsomers/ArchI.rar

As I remember from it's most recent release it had output text, moving sky background and the moving sprites which flew when he started going fast and the sky wrapped around.

You could also look into using Reflection, and it's abilities to create new Types on the fly.

The .Net framework achieves this via the System.Reflection namespace, using System.Reflection.Emit to create new types at runtime.

May or may not be useful, havn't looked too far into it myself.