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Monday Alexander Repenning Antiobjects: New Computational Approaches
in Education and Game Design Object-oriented programming has worked
quite well – so far. What are the objects, how do they relate to each
other? Once we clarified these questions we typically feel confident to design
and implement even the most complex systems. However, objects can deceive us.
They can lure us into a false sense of understanding. The metaphor of objects
can go too far by making us try to create objects that are too much inspired by
the real world. This is a serious problem, as a resulting system may be
significantly more complex than it would have to be, or worse, will not work at
all. We postulate the notion of an antiobject as a kind of object that appears
to essentially do the opposite of what we generally think the object should be
doing. As a Gedankenexperiment antiobjects allow us to literally think outside
the proverbial box or, in this case outside the object. I will discuss several
applications of antiobjects in education and game design. In a soccer
simulation example antiobjects are employed as part of a game AI called
Collaborative Diffusion. In Collaborative-Diffusion based soccer the player and
grass tile agents are antiobjects. Counter to the intuition of most programmers
the grass tile agents, on top of which all the players are moving, are doing
the vast majority of the computation, while the soccer player agents are doing
almost no computation. This presentation illustrates that this role reversal is
not only a different way to look at objects but, for instance, in the case with
Collaborative Diffusion, is simple to implement, incremental in nature and more
robust than traditional approaches. Biography: Alexander Repenning is a professor of
computer science at the |
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