Creating an AI Controller - A Distinct Lack of Imagination

Let me let you in on a secret. Imaginary numbers are a pain to work with in many computing languages, unless the language was specifically designed to deal with them. Just my luck, I chose a language which couldn't care less about complex math. And, again on par with my normal luck, it turns out the solution to my "curviness" problem involves imaginary numbers.

Let's back up a moment. A few weeks back I posted about the AI controller I am designing for my AI course. This controller involves equations which I wanted to allow to be curvy. Unfortunately, this curviness means the equations are cubic. This is fine when going in the forward direction, since the numbers are (primarily) outside the range of 1 to -1. Unfortunately, when going from a set member to a recommended action, all inputs are less than 1. This means that the input squared is less than the input, resulting a negative number under the square root in the cubic solver equation - meaning all three results of the cubic are imaginary.

It might be possible to still use this method if I was using a language with better support for complex numbers. Unfortunately, JavaScript is about as far from that as possible. There are libraries for it, or I could write a complex class myself. However, with time as short as it is, I've decided to simply abandon the idea of curviness for the output membership functions. It still works great for the inputs, but the outputs will have to be boring ole trapezoids. I'm hoping my thorough investigation of the problem still wins big "oooo ahhh" points from my lecturer.

In other news, I've coded all the basic requirements for my coursework now, including an automated track for the "car" to go around. Tasks still on my to-do list:

• Tune the controller manually
• Tune the track to cover all test cases (all rules)
• Results display
• Results export
• Controller settings export and import
• Genetic algorithm tuning (and display progress and results of said tuning)

The track here is running on it's own. Yes, that red circle is a car - don't question it!
You can also see the readouts of all the fuzzy controller stats.

It does feel good to know that if I absolutely had to, I could hand in what I have now and still pass (provided I wrote a decent report to go with it). I'm allowing myself three more days to finish this, then I'm cutting myself off and focusing exclusively on my DirectX project (which is going to need a LOT of attention).