I've just coded and tested the default AI. It is fun. The coding effort is less than I expected. No fancy AI technologies is used, yet. But I will improve it when I have time.

But I did stumble over AI order animation code. In local play mode, after a user submits his order, the human order animation is run from the Swing event dispatch thread. Then AI takes over, and starts a new AI order animation thread from the same 'one and only' Swing event dispatch thread. All three threads need to access the same data model. I hate Java threads and concurrency! It drives me nuts. After a day's tweaking, I have finally figured out a solution.

I went to Mackfest today to celebrate Alan Mackworth's contributions to AI. It was a lot of fun. I was happy to meet Alan and my sister again. It's been three years since we met last time! AKM is a great professor. I've learned a great deal from him. I also enjoyed the AI text book "Computational Intelligence" he co-authored with David Poole and Randy Goebel. I've read it at least twice.

Without his encouragement, TOS is almost impossible considering it's an after work project for me. With the birth of TOS, came the realization of my true potential. TOS is just the beginning, I know what I'm capable of:-)

I was also impressed by my sister's talk on her PARC robotic research projects. Obviously she's having great fun developing those robotic snakes:-)

An interesting piece of news in today's Vancouver Sun! A woodpecker has been smashing vehicle mirrors on Vancouver's east side. Apparently that woodpecker thought he's looking at another woodpecker in the mirror and he didn't like it a bit!

I've just finished the book "Apprentices of wonder - Inside the Neural Network Revolution". The book was published in 1989. The author is William F. Allman.

This book tells us stories of those pioneers in neural network research and development. The most interesting part of the book is about the fight between symbolic AI and connectionism AI. In the end, the author concluded that neither side won and the future of AI could be some form of the combination of these two. I totally agree with the author on this prediction.

I also liked the part of how our common sense mind is irrational. For example, in order to show that day-to-day human reasoning is not symbolic (totally rely on logic rules), the author gave us a very interesting study by psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky.

Apprentices of Wonder: Inside the Neural Network Revolution