Well first of all for people who have not been able to guess the meaning of 'AI' in the title, it refers to Artificial Intelligence.
And yes now coming back to the question, the question can be answered in a very simple way as, " I consider myself intelligent, thus I like intelligent people and also deserve my gadgets and machines to be intelligent". But there is more to the story. The above answer doesn't applies to me for many reasons, firstly, I am still not sure that whether I am intelligent or not and secondly, I don't like people on the basis of their intelligence and if I go on counting the number of friends of mine who are intelligent(or say considered to be intelligent, I know that all my friends are phattebaj, but still) and those who are not considered intelligent, it's the second group who is going to win.
The reason I like AI is that it's something which is considered as tough so in general, you can take as much time as you want to solve the problem and the fun part is that you are not sure that whether you would be able to solve the problem or not (this reminds me of codexcite organised by Sharat, even he used to be unsure about the existence of the solutions of those problems, but anyways). And yeah there are no limits you can make it as simple as you want and go into as much complexity as you want to go into. But, one of the major reasons why my interest persisted in AI is the secret that I almost always suceeded in solving the problems (mind that almost).
The Journey began with a "Cross n Naughts" game, in class 11th. I went a step further by not only making a game which could allow two players to play a game of cross n naughts, it had the facility of allowing the player to play against the computer. Luckily, ( well I shouldn't be using lucky here as at that time I used to work hard ) I was able to get an efficiency that the computer would either win or get the game draw against the player. And the biggest achievement was that it was made in TurboC .
Then came along the "Sudoku Solver" and even that worked (I was still quite hardworking). Which also helped us to win the sudoku challenge in Innovision last year (yes, u r guessing it right, there is a portable computer known as laptop).
And there was also a failed attempt for applying AI to a game of Chess,(remember the 'almost' at the end of last paragraph) I would like to give the credit of this failure to limitations of TurboC , sadly my code always hanged and I was tired of debugging it again and again.
And then finally came, AI Challenge (yes, it should have been kept in bold) , it started with a meeting with Deepank sir, and then came the phases of endless nightouts to make a code to play it out in an arena with Voldemort. The very much hyped mega event AI Challenge, which luckily (we were seriously lucky this time) went fine.
But, we learnt our lessons and came back with a bang with AI Challenge (yes, again it required a larger font too) at Innovision'08 , we made it bigger and better and from my expectations point of view a lot better. We were no more using TurboC , no file handling involved, no damn threading involved. In short, we added a hint of KISS to it and it clicked. And yes, this time Luckily I got quite hard working juniors, Vijit and Chirag, to work on the game ( do notice the word lucky this time). We got participation from IIT's, IIIT's, and yeah DCE and from even the colleges at the other end of the country, mind you Chennai, and quite a lot of credit for this goes to the juniors(Vijit and Chirag). But still, the people from NSIT rocked when it comes to AI, the winners were a team from NSIT only.
And now the little bit of Intelligence left in me, says that I should finally end this post as the answer seems to be almost complete.
Comments Welcomed!!!!
