Quick lesson in computer technology: Conventional hard-drives consist of very delicate moving parts which means if you drop your computer it is the part most susceptible to damage. To test this, I dropped my computer and the hard drive broke. My experimental data indicates that SSDs need to get much cheaper very quickly so that I can continue dropping my computer. Lesson learned, wait to drop your computer till you get a SSD. Have a good end of the semester!

Well this has been a long time coming, I'm happy to officially announce that ZooElite, an AI built in Squirrel on the NoAI framework for OpenTTD has reached it's (pre-)beta stage. Note that this isn't a Google Beta, but an actually beta. As defined by Wikipedia:

"Beta" is the software development phase following alpha, named after the Greek letter beta. It generally begins when the software is feature complete. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing. The process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release.

In addition, I'd like to clarify what exactly an AI is for the slew of people who have reduced this project to "Making a game that plays itself". AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, which in this context is intended to be an intelligent player of this game. The game does not play itself, persay, what we've done is created a computer competitor that has a unique style of play. So when a human is playing the game, they could play against one or multiple AI competitors. So we've created a program that takes into account the current circumstances of the game and tries to create as profitable a company as possible.

Anyways, this means that we have what is basically a fully functional AI. A few of the financial subroutines need to be tweaked, and perhaps we'll try to add some upgrade and save/load functionality, but otherwise...woo! Click here for a screenshot of what it does. Ignore all the extra signs and such, those were for debugging. Not too shabby!

Even after this screenshot, I spent a few more hours today debugging certain errors and trying to make more bus route optimizations. There should be one or two more major changes which will increase profitability and help with rapid expansion, but we'll address those in the next week or two. Till then, Cheers!

People have long been calling the post-millennium years the Information Age, but only recently has that name truly become a way of life for consumers and businesses across the globe. Partially created by globalization and partially by the rapid advancement and shrinking of technology, this trend which treats information as currency seems to be the new unit of trade in the digital millennium. Read on for my full analysis after the jump...

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