91Èȱ¬

Hello Outriders!

This week on the podcast I have been finding out about games designed by artificial intelligence, a world of cute that is about to cross over from the virtual space and what the pro’s use to do what they do.

Games designers work hard to hone their skills in game play, graphics, game theory and so much more in order to create something that is engaging and more importantly, that will sell well. But are there parts of that process that could be handed over to a different intelligence?

Just to reassure everyone, we’re not calling on the end of jobs for games makers, but, some very interesting work about game design has come from recent Artificial intelligence research by Michael Cook, a Phd student at the computational creativity group at Imperial College London and he makes software that designs video games. So, I asked him - who or what is ?

A hat tip to our friend Wagner James Au and his wonderful website for a tale of cute overload spilling out from the virtual world into the real world. A tiny creature take over is about to happen as the animals of Raglan Shire are heading over from their usual habitat and into our everyday lives.

Do not adjust your set, we’ve not become Book at Bedtime, but there are stories to be told and a couple of extraordinary and creative people who are used to making wonderful things in virtual spaces are now working on creating something for everyone. Wynx and Zane, as they are known online, are the creators of the - coming to a part of the real world near you.

We’ve heard here on Outriders that many great projects and ideas are developed along side people’s day jobs or in their spare time. Our next guest is a web developer at Flickr - the photo sharing site, but as if that is not enough, he also runs a neat site where he asks people to describe what they use to do what they do.

The set up is where all sorts of people describe their took kit and Daniel is the man who asks the questions...except for now, where I get to ask them...and so I started by asking him to describe .

Daniel was dreadfully modest there in our interview but if you pop by his site, you can nose around the set ups of people including novelist Charlie Stoss, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor and original Macintosh developer Andy Hertzfeld with many other brilliant people. It’s a simple idea, beautifully executed.

That's all for this week but as ever our digital doors are always open. I’d especially like to hear this week if you are celebrating or did celebrate Pi - day - that’s on the 14th of the 3rd of you’re a bit less nerdy than we are.

You can drop me a line on most social networks. Find us on and as Outriders or come and say hello on Twitter where we are .

Until next week!
~ Jamillah