Godot 4 has just been released! I I cant believe it even exists its so amazing. The scripting language is similar to python, but totally specialised for making games. Code can be edited LIVE and the running game updates. A beautiful fully featured IDE. The node system is very intuitive. 2D and 3D. A full build of a project and deploy to the Quest takes 20 seconds. I am in love with Godot. . Its the best thing since MSX Basic. It is the future of game development and will be used not only by indies but also in schools, colleges to teaching coding. It’s 100% free, open source, cross, platform, fully featured, versatile and light-weight game engine.
If you are interested in checking out my Godot experiments this is my repo with lots of examples of Boids, transforms, timers etc etc.
Recently, I posted a link to an article discussing the best way to give an ice bath to a baby on my Facebook page. Many people got upset and offended. People berated me for promoting the practice. People told me I should take the page down as a baby might get killed. The truth is – I have no idea if giving an ice bath to a new born baby is a good idea or not. I doubt it! That wasn’t the point of the article.
The page in question was generated by AI. I used chatgpt3 to generate the articles from prompts like “Write an article for a women’s magazine about whether to lower babies into ice baths by the head or by the feet” and “Write testimonials from parents about the benefits of giving daily ice baths to babies”. The resulting articles were creepy, hilarious and brilliant. I used Stable Diffusion to generate various pictures of smiling babies in baths of ice and put the whole lot into a Facebook page. I shared the article and it was interesting to observe how many people accepted it as real without noticing that all the babies have extra fingers and limbs, and the text doesn’t make sense in some of the articles.
I was inspired to create Ice Baths for Babies by these cool projects:
The Leeds 13
In 1998 a group of art students faked a trip to Malaga and leaked to the press that they had spent their grant money on the holiday. The group kept the pretence up for a week and revealed the truth a week later on a radio program they were invited onto to answer accusations from a hostile panel of commentators. Here is a great Vice documentary about the project:
A Modest Proposal
“A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick is a satirical essay published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729.
The essay suggests that impoverished Irish families might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the rich. The essay includes various suggestions for ways that children might be cooked. For example:
“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout”.
Mmmm delicious!
The fact is – there are amazing things happening in the field of Computer Science right now. chatgpt3 and Stable Diffusion are statistical models trained on billions of examples of text, question and answers, images and videos. The are the non-conscious intelligences, that Yuval Noah Harari wrote about in his book Homo Deus.
The are not people or animals. The do not have a soul, nor are they alive. But they are not search engines either. They are something totally different and nobody – not even the computer scientists knows quite what they are and what to do with them yet. I am thinking or all the ways this technology will make tedious tasks like writing exam papers, grant applications and code examples less time consuming and will improve my productivity. They amazing tools for creative thinking, though of course they make creating and spreading fake news really easy too which is all the more reason for people to question.
Hopefully this project got you thinking about Computer Science, Ethics, Fake News, Cognitive Biases Art, etc. etc.
As Oscar Wilde wrote:
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”
I recently read a fascinating thesis about nematodes. Nematodes are the most abundant multicellular organisms on the planet and there are around 40 quintillion of them. Inspired by the humble nematode, I wrote two programming lab tests.
This one is for fourth year Games Engines students and it uses C# and Unity to create a simulation of a school of nematodes swimming and wriggling and avoiding each other:
I recently was interviewed as part of an ITMA project in the Cobblestone pub by the renound Tom Mulligan. In the interview, I play a few sets of tunes, talk about Tunepal, Wim Hof breathing and various other things.
A simple voxel terrain generator using entities. One entity per voxel. The scene has 10K entities. Definitely not the best way to do this but it looks nice!
Watch two autonomous agents fight each other to the death over and over again.
Each agent has seek, pursue and path following boid behaviours. The agents also have health and ammunition and a finite state machine. Source code in the more_states branch of this repo:
Dr Bryan Duggan's Blog 