There was a time when everything seemed possible on the Artificial Intelligence field. Around the fifth decade, everyone was imagining that computers would be able to recreate humans in a few years time span. This was proved to be a wrong assumption. And around the seventh decade, a philosopher (Hubert Dreyfus) was the first to guess it right.

Did a philosopher kill WALL-E? is a great article describing this subject. It describes the AI boom, lead mainly by Alan Turing’s works, and how everyone came to realize that the human brain was still a too complex and rich to be cloned by a machine. Dreyfus was also the first to suggest that researchers should look into other fields of study, mainly Philosophy, to find new information about how we really think and learn.

At a time when researchers were proposing grand plans for general problem solvers and automatic translation machines, Dreyfus predicted that they would fail because their conception of mental functioning was naive, and he suggested that they would do well to acquaint themselves with modern philosophical approaches to human being.

And it was through that line of thinking that we found some of the most promising group of algorithms, mainly Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms, both heavily based on discoveries in the Biology field. What more can we learn from other fields?

Unjust Deserts is an essay written by Mary Poppendiek about Team Compensation, specially on Agile environments. I found it on a Coding Horror post (for a change), On Our Project, We’re Always 90% Done, which I also recommend reading.

The essay describes a situation where a team done a very good job on a project and the management department asks to their project manager who was the most valuable worker. It shows how difficult that task may be, when the project success depends on the active collaboration between the development team and, sometimes, between multiple departments. How should the developers be rewarded? If the entire team or even the entire company is rewarded, will someone be treated unfairly? And which rewards should be considered: always money, more responsibility, a promotion? A few excerpts:

While monetary rewards can be a powerful driver of behaviour, the motivation they provide is not sustainable. Once people have an adequate income, motivation comes from things such as achievement, growth, control over one’s work, recognition, advancement, and a friendly working environment.

Treat monetary rewards like explosives because they will have a powerful impact whether you intend it or not. So use them lightly and with caution. They can get you into trouble much faster than they can solve your problems.

Some good advices there, definitely. We (developers) must be a difficult bunch to manage. But, from my perspective, it all comes to the fact that we’re not just like the regular employee. If a manager can’t understand what thrills us, we’re doomed to be misunderstood.

I’ve been a bit involved in the development of flash websites for the Wii Opera Browser and so, I decided to do a little round-up of links and tips. The information that I could find is all scattered across multiple places, so I though a bit of aggregation could help.

The Wii Opera Browser

It’s named Internet Channel and it costs 5€, or 500 Wii Points if you prefer. It’s estimated in 40% the number of Wii owners that bought the browser.

The Opera development team wrote an article about Making Wii-friendly pages (it’s only available through the Internet Archive now) and here’s another article on the subject. For browser related help, hit the Opera Forums.

Flash Player

As it is said on the above links, only the version 7 of the Flash Player is available. For a detailed list of what that means in terms of features, here’s the specs. The ones I would like to emphasize:

• Dynamic loading of multimedia files limited only to JPEG and MP3;
• Only ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0 are available;
• Device-specific capabilities aren’t available (mainly specific devices created later on for some Wii Games: Microphones, Cameras, etc…);
• XMLSockets aren’t available.

Besides that, count on hard restriction on processing power and amount of memory (RAM, cache, ...) available.

Wii Remote API

The Flash Player SDK implementation isn’t perfect, so it’s preferred you resort to a JavaScript based API. The Wii Remote API at WiiCade Labs it’s the best available (if not the only one) and already brings all you need to easily start using it on your flash application. Features include, for example, the angle and distance from the screen of the four Wii Remotes. For more info check out the documentation.

Design

Count on low resolution and try to use small-sized images. For design tips, when it comes to try a Wii Style application, check out this guide.

That’s it. If you have any issue or doubt, just ask. I’m not really a profession in this theme, but you can count on some field experience.