Favourite Web-Based Tutorials

If you want to learn a new skill, these days the internet is the first place you should start. There are tutorials, videos and quick start guides for just about everything. However the internet is a big place so finding the good stuff isn’t always easy.

YouTube is wonderful to see exactly how something is done, but I also like to print tutorials in case the host site disappears. So here is a collection of the stuff I’ve found really useful.

This post will be updated from time to time depending on what I find…

IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games

The IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games took place in Perth in 2008. I was privileged to be asked to be one of the judges for the Computer Artificial Intelligence (AI) competition, the 2K Bot Prize. Excellent! Paid to play games and I won the very nice trophy pictured left for being the most accurate judge.

A cash prize of $7,000 plus a trip to a major games studio in Canberra was on offer for anyone who could create a game-playing bot (the game was Unreal Tournament 2004) that passes the “Turing Test for Bots”, that is say the bot AI had to convince a panel of five judges that it is actually a human player.

So how did I pick the bots from the humans…..read on as I describe the strategies I used and explain what gave the bots away or convinced me a player was human.

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Agent Based Modelling (ABM)

Have turned the focus of my current research to ABM. Using a collection of autonomous decision-making entities called agents it is possible to explore the dynamics of real-world systems, including the relationships between entities, their environment and resulting emergent behaviour. Cool stuff and far more exciting than excel spreadsheets.