Blog 1 - Davin Barron
About Me:
Hey Guys, my name is Davin and it is an absolute pleasure to meet you! 😀
I'm writing this blog to tell you guys all about me! 😄
To begin, I am currently in my final year of the BSc (Hons) in Applied Computing, doing a stream in Games Development at SETU. I was born in Bangkok, Thailand and absolutely love Thai food. My favourite would probably be Pad Kra Pao, but there's also many other classics like Tom Yum and Pad Thai. I don't know Thai myself since I would've came to Ireland while I was still pretty young, but I have been back many times, you guys should definitely plan a trip there some time! 😉
My main hobbies include camping, reading, exercising and gaming. Believe it or not, my love for video games was the reason I decided to do this course 🎮 I had a lot of fun learning about games development and being able to make my very own games but I also learned a lot more about other aspects of computing too!
Interesting Blogs from IOT:
While I was having a look through the blogs, I found the design pattern for the steampunk hat to be very interesting.
https://steampunkbots.blogspot.com/2023/02/steam-punk-hat-design-pattern-dominik.html
I like seeing these sort of design ideas spring to life as it helps me to get a visual sense as to what they envisioned for the project. I also really enjoyed the steampunk aesthetic so that's a plus for me!
Ideas:
Voice Feature
I think adding some sort of voice feature would be pretty cool. The other day in class we talked about how the eyes were made to make it more human-like so giving the bin bot a voice would be adding to that idea :)
For example, when the bin bot detects that rubbish has been thrown onto the ground, it reacts to it and says something like "Bro, are you serious?!". I think that would be kind of funny!
A voice command would also be nice. In this case, think about someone with a disability, instead of going to the bin bot themselves, they can just ask the bin bot to come to them.
Finite State Machines:
Recently in class we learned about finite state machines which is a behavioural design pattern where we can describe a system using states and transitions. A state is like the mode that the system is in and transitions is the action it takes to enter another state. Most importantly there can only be one input but there can be many outputs for each transition.
History
The story of state machines stretches back to the 1930s, when Alan Turing introduced the idea of abstract machines, which is kind of nuts to think about. Who knew it went that far back!
Then in the 1950s researchers like Kleene, Rabin, and Scott built on that foundation by formalising finite automata and showing how they connect to regular expressions, their work later inspired Chomsky and others in the 1960s which eventually led to the practical state machines used in circuits, compilers, and software today.
What I found interesting is that finite state machines helped in the development of AI as we know it.
Did you know that finite state machines is still the most used algorithm in AI agents today?
Especially when developing AI for games systems!
My State Machine
This is my first ever state machine diagram!
It only gets better from here 😎
I decided to make use of colour coding to help visualise the different states and what transitions are linked to which state.
Places state machines were used
For me the coolest place that state machines are used in is games development.
They are heavily used to model the behaviour of pretty much everything from enemy AI and player movements.
A great example of this is the arcade game Pac-Man which was developed in the 80s. The game uses state machines to switch the ghosts behaviour between chasing the player and fleeing away.
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