On the left we see Mathematician and Software Engineer Marios Richards while on the right we have Dr. Burckhardt, owner of Ludic Philosophy, GmbH. They are working on the problem of connecting a physics engine to a system for creating and handling agents: a model of the physical world mapped to a model of the mental world.
It’s pretty incredible when you get to see a thing go from some quick sketches on paper followed with a lot of arm waving and slap-dash metaphors to a real, living and breathing product. And that’s just what we’re seeing here. Because Ludic Philosophy is so bantam weight, the speed of change and evolution is blinding. In the past few weeks, Dr. Burckhardt appears to pull new tools and applications from thin air. His creativity and energy is infectious. When he talks about his vision, you can see the excitement behind his eyes. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for: an intimate team of people who are really into what they are doing.
Right now, a large focus of the company is making Agent Oriented Programming a reality. This has the potential to be a paradigm shift. Agent Oriented Programming was first detailed in a paper by Yoav Shoham in 1991. You can read his paper on the subject here. I’m still reading through it myself and hope to write a more detailed post in the near future. The basic idea switches from a world of functions that manipulate objects to one where autonomous agents manipulate objects and interact with each other based on things like beliefs, capacities, goals, and obligations. Dr. Burckhardt sees some very interesting possibilities in new definitions of machine learning and human/machine interaction. Right now, it’s still early days, but the ideas are flowing and prototype creation is fast and heavy. In the next week, we will see the realization of our first efforts towards a demonstrable example of what this concept can do. I’m very happy to be here at the beginning. What an opportunity!
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