Ever fantasized about freezing the world as it stands, blowing everything out, and starting out from scratch to create a new world, populated just the way you wanted? Here's your chance to fulfill that fantasy. Fire up your trusty PC, get your Visual C++ cranking, climb into your bug-resistant programming teflon suit, and you're ready to go. In Windows Hothouse, Mark Clarkson shows you how to create, assemble and generate your own artificial world using the Visual C++ programming language on your IBM PC or compatible.
January 8, 1997
Windows Hothouse is neither a book about programming nor a book about artificial intelligence. Mark Clarkson weaves in a little of both, and adds a fair measure of object-oriented programming to help you create your fantasy world. If you've never programmed in Visual C++, or for Microsoft Windows, there's nothing to fear. The author's clearly written instructions, logical explanations, and enumerated steps, combined with screen shots showing your progress make the task easy and fairly straightforward. The floppy disk that accompanies the book contains the complete programming code along with the project settings needed for successfully compiling each project.
At the end of each chapter, you finish a complete programming project. This is a powerful show-and-tell method of learning the techniques of creating artificial life-forms. You don't have to plod through five "introduction" chapters before getting to the really interesting stuff, the author limits the introduction to a tolerable single chapter. Chapter two zooms you directly to creating a game based on British mathematician Conway's LIFE simulation. By the time you reach Chapter Five, the halfway point, you are already creating genetic algorithms and making frogs jump and leap about on your Windows screen. When you begin building a better biomorph (Chapter 8), you would have already worked through 3D rendering and isometric projections and be ready to create a mutating biological virus that starts with a few strands and multiplies in seemingly random fashion. The author ends the book with an assembly-language inspired program called "Core Wars" where two programs fight each other until one is killed by the other.
Since the concepts and the programming logic are correctly presented as more important than the nitty-gritty VC++ programming details, it shouldn't be too hard to adapt the projects to other operating systems and computers such as the Macintosh. And the book's a great start if you're at school and need ideas for a new programming project really quick.
One of the best things about the book is that it opens up your imagination to the artificial intelligence world, while gently leading you into the intricacies of the Visual C++ programming. Each project is open-ended, and chapters end with tips, exercises and puzzles that allow you to expand the program whichever way you like. If you follow the steps shown, you will be creating leaping frogs, chirping birds, simulation games and be well on your way to fulfilling your vision of the world. The conversational style and easy prose make a technical and sometimes complex subject easy to follow, fun to learn and a pleasure to use. Definitely recommended if you're at all interested in this area and want to show some nifty results in a graphical environment. Mark Clarkson knows his programming, and makes the work of creating artificial life on your computer a fun hobby.
