[Geowanking] Silver Island Bunker Trail: Hike Like a Bot!

[Brett Stalbaum]

Hello geowanking list,

I have been lurking on this list for sometime and appreciate the 
opportunity to learn, find new tools, and all of the interoperation 
discussions. I don't know if this generative hiking gps project of ours 
is exactly what this list would take an interest in... but if anything 
is on topic here it may be the homebrew C5 Landscape Database API the 
video makes reference to. One note is that the version of the API with 
the A* virtual hiker is not released yet... planned soon. Anyway, 
project description and video follow... thanks, sorry if wasting your time.

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... 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