Silver Island Bunker Trail: Hike Like a Bot!

Aug. 6, 2007

Type: discussion

(Portuguese, Espanol and Deutsch: http://silverisland.paintersflat.net/)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMpAeuJd6YQ

The Silver Island Mountain Range is in the arid and barren Great Salt
Lake desert in North America. The mountain range is called an "island"
because it is surrounded by the salt flats and muds of the ancient
Pleistocene era lake Bonneville, now dry in this area. The nearby cities
of West Wendover, Nevada, and Wendover, Utah, are bisected by the border
between the two states. West Wendover never sleeps, featuring many
casinos, adult distractions and reasonably priced hotel rooms. Wendover
Utah features the historic Wendover Air Field, an industrial landscape
focusing primarily on mineral extraction, aviation, military uses, and
the facilities and exhibit halls of the Center for Land Use
Interpretation. (www.clui.org)

Using the Open Source C5 Landscape Database API (www.c5corp.com),
paintersflat.net used a "virtual hiker" (a generative computer
algorithm) to identify a hiking path across the island between two
abandoned World War Two era bunkers, one on the West shore of the Silver
Island Range, the other on the East shore. The virtual hiker implements
the A* algorithm, an artificial intelligence path finding algorithm
often used in computer games, executed over digital elevation model data
describing the terrain as a friction surface. The algorithm produced a
Global Positioning System tracklog file, which was uploaded to a GPS
device, allowing Brett Stalbaum and Paula Poole to be the first to hike
the very traversable trail on March 26th, 2007 and possibly allowing
them to become the first people ever to traverse a real landscape as an
artificially intelligent game bot would cross it.

More info at: http://silverisland.paintersflat.net/

–
Brett Stalbaum, Lecturer, LSOE
Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM)
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
Department of Visual Arts
9500 GILMAN DR. # 0084
La Jolla CA 92093-0084
http://www.c5corp.com
http://www.paintersflat.net