Brain

In this chapter we will focus on developing the brain. There is no particular order in which to develop the different parts of the brain. The background chapter will be used as inspiration but feel free to plot your own course.

In order to forego the tedium of creating a web server, we provided starter kits. This way you can dive in to the interesting part of developing the brain of your boids.

Because of that we will describe the various parts in pseudo code.

Registering

But the first thing to do is register you brain server to the workshop server. Each starter kit provides a means of registering, so pick one of the provided starter kits and follow the instructions in the README.

Naming

One way to identify your flock is by team name. We propose to use the following naming scheme. With your team mates, pick your favorite color, your favorite city, your favorite animal and string them together with dashes. E.g. yellow-nijmegen-ant or blue-ibiza-flamingo.

With this scheme the visualisation on the big screen becomes more distinct. If you need suggestions for good color names, take a look at some color values over at MDN.

The Big Screen

Take a look at the big screen. If you succesfully registered your team, you should see your team in the right side column.

Brain Server

Having registered is not the only step before you can start developing your boids brain. You also need to start your brain server. Again, with a start kit this should be described thoroughly.

The workshop server will periodically check for a heartbeat on your brain server. You can see if your brain server is alive by looking for the connection symbol next to your team on the big screen.