Nathan Capstone Blog

My favorite project related technology? Difficult to say. I feel our project is relatively low tech. It mostly seems to be a lot of hard coding of things. That said I suppose that my favorite bit of tech would probably be the graphical interface, for which we are using the tkinter Python library. I have used once before, when I had no prior GUI making, and I can affirm that is a very intuitive and convenient, and user friendly software to use. I highly recommend it. The GUI, for me is the best part of the program since it actually produces something that the viewer can see and make sense of, and feel like they are witnessing something evolving right before their very eyes. Basically it’s the technology that makes the simulation come alive. Otherwise, you are just left with a bunch of data.

I can’t say we are using AI a whole lot. I am occasionally using ChatGPT for help, which is really quite useful. But ultimately it just ends up being an advance and specific search engine. In that way it is quite convenient, somewhat like having a personal teacher. Otherwise, I guess I would like to implement something in the project that might somewhat be considered an AI. I would like to have organism that when faced with a decision, make the decision randomly with a given probability, and then based on the outcome of that decision, have that probability be modified. For instance, if a decision leads to an increase in energy or in successful procreation, the probability of doing that might be increased. Hopefully, overtime, this would lead to a greater prevalence in that advantageous behavior. I had heard similar strategy was used in early AI models in the 50s, in tic-tac-toe, where a move from a certain position that lead to a win, would then have its probability increased. Overtime, this lead the program to play better games. However, this feature has yet to be successfully implemented.