Points of travel for Machine Control Experiment
I’m on vacation in Kauai with Brittany. Although its fun to lay around in front of a beach all day, I like to keep my head busy. So I popped out a notebook and started scribbling up thoughts on the Minions software I’m working on.
One of the parts I want to simplify with the new system is moving subjects around to different points in the scene. The current Machine Control Experiment takes some care not to put two people in the same place at the same time even though we can run up to four people simultaneously. Still, it is easy to make mistakes and end up with a couple people competing for physical space.
What I want to do is model the physical world inside Minions and let the software route people around in trouble-free fashion. Minions doesn’t need to know that much about the space. I think I can abstract the scene area into interconnected nodes. So if I take the graph shown in the figure above, which matches the scene area we’ve used for Machine Control Experiment at the CSPC, then one location can be modelled like:
- Name: Viewing Area
- Capacity: 4 people
- Connection to Excursion Point (Capacity: 1 person)
- Connection to Supply Station (Capacity: 1 person)
Locations need a maximum capacity of how many people can be there. In our viewing area at CSPC, we’ve set up four chairs for people to sit in and watch a hypnotizing movie of a red robot. If somebody gets up from the viewing area to walk to the Excursion Point, its only easy for that person to walk out if he’s the only one leaving the Viewing Area. So I say that the connection from Viewing Area to Excursion Point just has a one-person capacity.
With these capacities in mind, I can have a little piece of code in the program that says:
- travelTo(“The Witness”)
…and the trip all the way from the Viewing Area to The Witness will be booked, checking for capacity problems on the way, in much the same way you book an airplane flight. If the booking fails, then the program will get that information and send the subject to some other audio that keeps them waiting in place for maybe 20 seconds before attempting another trip. During that idle time, the subject might be fed background information about Machine Society, read robot poems, or something.
Once the trip is booked, Minions can patch together pieces of audio in telephone menu fashion to instruct the subject on the route to take from the current location to the final destination.
-Captain Erik
