Project Pitch

In this exploration project, I will be exploring artificial intelligence as it applies to Unity and--more specifically--the extent to which I can successfully emulate the act of learning and language comprehension through simple C# code. 

The core gameplay of this prototype will likely consist of constructing robots for a series of employers by dragging various parts together and then providing those robots with a set of written instructions that help prepare it for the job it will need to perform. The player's creation will then be scored based on its response to specific test stimuli (ex: a fireman robot may be asked "what do you do if a building is on fire", to which the proper response would be some variation of "use water"), the results of which determine whether the player cleared the job conditions and may proceed to the next client's request.

In order to achieve this, I have already begun writing some pseudocode (pictured above) that should offer enough flexibility for what I am trying to accomplish. However, there are a few trade-offs that will likely have to be made to make a project like this feasible. For instance, the only words the player can use will be those within a pre-defined dictionary of roughly 300 or so (with many of them being synonyms of one another), and a fair bit of grammatical nuance will inevitably need to be stripped away so deciphering their meanings won't be too impossible a task. Though sentences like "A jack of all trades, master of none is often times better than a master of one" are certainly showy and intriguing, the user would likely have to boil it down to "A jack of all trades is better than a master of one" in order to be understood by the SentenceParser (not to mention, the only portion of that sentence which would actually be stored as an Axon would be ["jack of all trades", "master of one", perception, +1]  ).

Ultimately, while I am quite certain this project won't be an easy one, I'm still quite looking forward to giving it a go all the same.