Oh, and because I am interested in the potential of high-fidelity physical simulation as a basis for AI research, I did spend some time recently looking into options. Unfortunately the results, from my perspective, were disappointing. The common open-source physics libraries like ODE, Newton, and so on, have marginal feature sets and frankly cannot scale very well performance-wise. Once I even did a little application whose purpose was to see whether a human being could learn to control an ankle joint to compensate for an impulse event and stabilize a simple body model (that is, to make it not fall over) by applying torques to the ankle. I was curious to see (through introspection) how humans learn to act as process controllers. http://happyrobots.com/anklegame.zip for anybody bored enough to care. It wasn't a very good test of the question so I didn't really get a satisfactory answer. I did discover, though, that a game built around more appealing cases of the player learning to control physics-inspired processes could be quite absorbing. Beyond that, the most promising avenue seems to be physics libraries tied to "graphics" hardware being worked on by the hardware companies to help sell their stream processors. The best example is Nvidia, who bought PhysX and ported it to their latest cards, giving a huge performance boost. Intel has bought Havok and I can only imagine that they are planning on using that as the interface to some Larrabee-based physics engine. I'm sure that ATI is working on something similar for their newer (very impressive) stream processing cards. At this stage, though, despite some interesting features and leaping performance, it is still not possible to do things like get realistic sensor maps for a simulated soft hand/arm, and complex object modifications like bending and breaking are barely dreamed of in those frameworks. Complex multi-body interactions (like realistic behavior when dropping or otherwise playing with a ring of keys or realistic baby toys) have a long ways to go. Basically, I fear those of us who are interested in this are just waiting to ride the game development coattails and it will be a few years at least until performance that even begins to interest me will be available. Just my opinions on the situation.
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