An introduction for what it's worth.

[Aetherius Rimor]

Hello Bluelight, finally decided to start posting here. Been a member of the Nexus, but found the larger user base/more liberal allowance of topics to provide an interesting change of pace here.

I'm in my late 20's, career in software development (AI for majority of it, unfortunately less appealing business logic/project manager type position now), and the goto guy in my social circle for knowledge of witchcra... oh wait, it's the 21st century, psychoactive substances.

Plan on going back to school as soon as it's feasible in pursuit of a bachelors in Cognitive Science, with an intention of continuing on to obtain a PhD in Cognition with specializations in artificial intelligence and psychopharmacology. Have mushrooms/LSD to thank for that discovery of purpose, but a tale for another day.

I'm a strong advocate of responsible drug usage, including respecting the powers they allow you to wield over your own body, moderation, knowing your limits and not putting yourself in positions where an altered state of mind could endanger yourself or others. I have a personal set of rules I follow to ensure my safety in this regard. With these rules, I've managed to never have a bad trip, never end up in a health related emergency, and have maintained a clean record and never been arrested.

I still consider my wealth of knowledge to be vastly inferior in the grand scheme of things, despite friends' opinions, but always willing to research any question they have, or any curiosity of my own, and figure this place can assist me in that endeavor. In return, I hope I can also contribute in spreading the knowledge I've learned.

I believe reading can only go so far in the quest for knowledge, so I have proceeded in self-experimentation with the plethora of amazing psychoactive substances the universe has gifted us.

I've personally experienced, so can give first hand experience based descriptions/comparions of, in order of first usage:

Theophylline
Paroxetine
Setraline
Risperidone
Valproate semisodium
Cannabis
Alcohol
Nicotine
MDMA
LSD
DXM
Mushrooms
Ketamine
MDA
Methoxetamine
Diphenhydramine (Passed out before the real fun, but did see random appearing black dots that moved around)
Adderall
Vyvanse
Clonazepam
2C-E
2C-I
Morphine Sulfate (Oral pill)
Tramadol
Suboxone
Caffeine (First time in pill form, I never drink coffee/energy drinks, only other source is mountain dew)
4-MEO-PCP
2C-T-2
Niacinamide (at a dose capable of giving Benzo type effects)
DMAA
Desoxyephedrine
Carisoprodol
Oxycodone
Quetiapine
Valerian root (powdered and capsuled)
25I-NBOME
Promethazine
GHB
Metaxalone
Phenibut
Mescaline (Threshold)
Diacetylmorphine
Adrafinil
5-MEO-DIPT
BK-MBDB
2C-B
Changa (DMT infused with MAOI)


Current todo list:

PCP
5-MEO-DMT (Bufo)
Ibogaine
DiPT

I hope I can learn and contribute to the goals of this site.

 

[aveoturbo]

Welcome! Thats quite the list you have generated there @.@

Hope you enjoy your time here and do look forward to your posts. Am intrigued with your current career, would you care to elaborate a bit more on how you help create the AI of a game? Just curious about it.

If you ever have any questions feel free to send myself or any of the mods here a PM and we would be more than happy to help you out You can also reach me on AIM as well, my user handle is the same as on here.

Have fun!

 

[Aetherius Rimor]

Two types you'll see first off, learning and non-learning:

Haven't done any learning algorithms for gaming, except path finding for unknown terrain in a 3d world, so couldn't help you much on specifics, but can give brief overview. Path finding with learning was as simple as routinely gathering a list of points in the terrain that are known to be traversable (based on the physic rules of the game), iterating over them and determining it's connectivity to all the points currently known that are nearby and running a collision check to ensure you can move from one point to the other, and if allowed adding it to the database. Once you have enough data, you can use A* to discover shortest path between two points to enable intelligent navigation.

For other activities, applying a set of rewards/costs for certain states or actions, setting a goal and using the techniques needed to determine best course of actions. If an action has an unknown reward/cost, it can optionally be attempted, and the result recorded, and new distance from goal determined.

Assume an RPG, an AI's goal might be to reduce your HP to zero while maintaining it's own survival. Any action that lowers your HP could have a reward equal to the amount of HP it removes on average per second, and a cost composed of whatever resources are expended (mana for instance) and time to complete. So it will optimally choose the maneuvers that maximize it's DPS. If a melee enemy has a ranged attack option, but over the next 20 seconds it could maximize damage by spending 5 seconds to move next to you, and 15 seconds doing melee, instead of 20 doing ranged, the option of moving towards you has a reward of the melee DPS * 15 seconds - cost to move for 5 seconds, becoming the optimal choice of action.

As far as non-learning... that can really just be a large state/action decision tree with some randomization thrown in, and threshold levels for actions. Cast "Heal Self" if it's hp is below 20% for instance. Technically can still use the cost/reward structure, but far easier to see and modify the "script" if just checking thresholds for certain decisions to be made. Also far easier to add artificial stupidity in that regard. For instance a mob that for instance that hate's casters for story reasons, targeting casters, even if the warrior is the higher threat in the reward/cost system.

It's quite feasible to see cheap player tactics in AI mobs if a developer doesn't take it into account. If you add a cost for being in a certain physical location in the DPS regard, for instance to prevent the mob from standing in lava, you could inadvertently create an AI that will kite melee players if it's capable of predicting future DPS states of a location from moving lava/damaging objects.

 

[aveoturbo]

Jeebus, thanks for taking the time to explain that in fairly good amount of detail and in layman terms .

I bet you are one who is hypercritical of video games since you understand a lot of their inner workings, yes? Just an assumption, I may be wrong and if so, apologies, I really dont mean it to be offensive. Its sort of like how a friend and I are writing a script and he is a cinema geek. He is really critical when it comes to movies and does not hesitate to tell me. He still enjoys them of course, because why else go see them, but, he will look for anything and everything he can find thats wrong. I always remind him that its hard to make anything that is not flawed in some way. Me not so much, I am just on board to offer ideas and proofread more than anything but have a few times caught myself becoming more critical about films I watch. He takes it to a whole different level than myself tho.

Again, thanks! Appreciate that brief lesson!

 

[Aetherius Rimor]

I'm not so much critical, but extremely good at determining the underlying implementations of functionalities and figuring out their unintended consequences

 

[JoshE]

Welcome