[Somewhat Off Topic] AI Contest

[Mike Clarkson]

On 5 Aug 2001 13:39:14 +0100, Doug Fort <dougfort at dougfort.net> wrote:

>From SlashDot: http://www.a-i.com/challenge/. A contest for developing 
>game-playing bots. I really want to write intelligent agents in Python, and 
>this sounds like an interesting exercise.

I think this would be  very interesting exercise. Given the short
timeline, a good starting point might be to use an imbedded version of
CLIPS (http://www.ghg.net/clips/CLIPS.html). It's small, fast,
portable, extremely well documented and PD.

"Alexander V. Voinov" <avv at quasar.ipa.nw.ru> has a tar of a SWIG
wrapped Clips (Fuzzy Clips 6.04) for Python 1.5 on starship:
ftp://starship.python.net/pub/crew/avv/clips-wrapper.tgz based on work
done by Vladimir Ulogov <gandalf at python.eu.org> Perhaps this could be
brought up to date for Python 2.1. (I have the SWIG interface files,
which are missing from the tgz file.)

>IMHO the extreme flexibility of data structures and procedures makes Python 
>a superb language for AI (whatever that is)

I agree. If Python as a language works as CP4E, then it should be able
to encompass AI. What would be really COOL (pun intended) is if the
CLIPS object system was compatible with Python's - then the COOL
classes in CLIPS could be replaced with Python's, allowing for a
seamless integration with CLIPS. Then maybe we could look for a
"Pythonic" syntax for stating rules.

Mike.