Lightbot is one of the most awesome flash games I have come across. Don't let the article title fool you into thinking that this is some geek stuff that requires technical knowledge. It doesn't. What it does require is the love for puzzles and/or free time to kill.

Lightbot is a brilliant introduction to programming for anyone who doesn't know how to write code and wants to learn. This game will teach you the fun in programming and help you see how programming is relevant to problem solving in everyday life. Also, any programmer who calls himself that should be able to finish the 13 levels in breeze. Else you should consider yourself another career.

You can directly play the game in the flash box below.

Insane Central Arcade

The objective of the game is to move the lightbot (the cute looking robot) to the blue square and light the square. This is done by providing commands to the robot. Once you command the robot to reach the blue square and light it, the playing field changes and obstacles are introduced in different styles in newer maps. The difficulty level increases as you progress (not everyone might agree to this) and simple but interesting programming concepts are introduced gradually.

The game screen has commands at the top in the form of icons. Commands are like: Turn right, turn left, jump, light the bulb etc. To command the robot, drag the icon into the main function (one command per tile, a total of 12 tiles available) in the order in which you want the commands to be executed. Click on "Go" to see the robot in action. If you make a mistake, you can always change the sequence of commands and try again by clicking "Stop" and "Go" again. As the levels progress you will notice that you will need more than 12 commands to get the lightbot to reach all the blue squares and light them up. So you put in the additional commands into either or both of the functions Funct1 and Funct2 provided and call them inside the main function by using the F1 and the F2 command icons in the main.

Like I said earlier, this truly is one of the best ways to introduce kids to programming and I feel bad about not having the opportunity to play a game like this as a kid when I was learning to program. Have fun. And remember, the boss is always looking from behind your shoulders when you are playing at work. But of course, your code is compiling.

Lightbot for the iphone/ipod touch is now available at the itunes store.

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I have been a skeptic of being able to achieve true AI as we know human intelligence. We are talking about humans designing artificially what evolution has taken billions of years to develop.

However, I am beginning to think that I might be wrong. Jeff Hawkins - enterpreneur and scientist has been working on what is called Hierarchical Temporal Memory that tries to model the brain and this just might be the best approximation of the brain behavior we have. This video lecture has him explain its functioning and at the end of the video I come out convinced that Jeff is onto something big here. I can't help but feel that there is an opportunity to build something much more capable than the human brain overcoming biological limitations of the human body and solve very complex problems by scaling the model across powerful computers.

Jeff Hawkins company Numenta is working on commercializing this technology and has released the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) which can be downloaded from the Numenta website.

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There is a ton of money to be made programming for the Apple iPhone. iPhone applications can be hosted by developers at the Apple App Store. If you are giving away your application for free, then apple does not charge you for hosting the application. If however you charge for your software, you have to pay a small percentage to apple for every sale besides a one time fee.

From a 1000$ application called I am rich which displays a red gem on the screen just to prove that you are rich because you paid for the application (6 people actually bought the application before it was taken off the app store) to useful applications like note takers, games, text editors, eBook readers and much more, the iphone is the a great development platform because of its wide availability and popularity. Most not-free applications sell for around 99 cents making developers a good deal of money by selling in large volumes. It is not so difficult to make $250,000 in 2 months with a simple application developed as a side project.

So what do you need to take the plunge? Previously, the only information available for iPhone development came exclusively from apple and developers had to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to get access to technical details to assist them. The NDA prohibited iPhone developers from writing tutorials, guides, blogs, books, and even wikis about the iPhone SDK. Recently, they dropped the NDA and have opened up the freedom to publish books and articles for the iphone.

Apple has made available a software development kit for the iPhone with which programmers can develop applications for the iPhone.

If you are an amateur programmer, Stanford university provides course materials for the iPhone programming class which can be accessed here.

There are a ton of other links on the internet which elaborate on the entire process of developing applications for the iPhone to getting it to the apple store. Check out some of these here:

• Learn how to develop for the iphone
• Develop iPhone applications using ruby on rails
  
• iPhone development in 22 not so easy steps
  
  

If you are not motivated enough to develop for the iphone, check out these articles:

• Tap Tap Tap 1 week sales
• Part-time Apps developers getting rich
  
• iPhone developers go from rags to riches

Still thinking if its worthwhile??

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