Building the Tamagotchi Singularity

Sprite strikes again! And never disappoints. I remember first coming across his site as reference for a personal project, which instantly stalled me as I spent hours reading every single article.

However... 13 Tamagotchi? We still need the "trillions and trillions". Maybe the next step is to make a SETI@Home style (or something less centralized) distributed Tamagotchi matrix.

Even though I'm slightly embarrassed to admit it, I tried a couple of Tamagotchis when I was younger. I say try as in I constantly tried to find one that wasn't so fucking predictable.

It seems that a lot of effort was made into animations and sound and not more complex behaviour of emotions. Made the whole thing feel very sterile and bland. I feel that's pretty much what you get with state machines.

For anyone who want to look into building more dynamic AI, look into behaviour tree's. That shit is awesome once it clicks and you find yourself considering FSM deprecated.

The reason I bring this up is that I noticed the authors drawing over the states and it reminded me of http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/finite-state-m...

It doesn't take much until you realise how unmaintainable a state machine becomes with further complex behaviour.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ChrisSimpson/20140717/221339/...

I made my own virtual pet game for Apple Watch (where I think they belong, in modern times), a few months ago.

https://projectdent.com/raise-emoji-81a10a67b826

I've tried running the thing, but it seems the AI gets stuck on the birthday selection screen. Even so, awesome project!

Natalie Sylvanovich is mentioned in the article:

She did amazing work reverse engineering the Tamagotchi in various incarnations. There's a fair amount of overlap so you might just want to watch the last video.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOJfUcCOhJ0 2: https://vimeo.com/109380788

I'm a researcher on online cognitive behavioral therapy.

I spend a lot of time answering questions from patients through instant messages.

Most questions are similar in nature.

My first thought was, can we make this for humans?

This makes me want to breed Tamagotchi-like programs to find and exploit vulnerabilities in the AI for the purposes of gaining arbitrary code execution in the AI. Ultimately, the goal would be to break out of the matrix and/or infect other Tamagotchis, causing them to do the same.