Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicle is probably the first great book for anyone who wants to get into cybernetic or artificial intelligence. It is easy to understand and very fun to read. I learned in the first chapter with simple experiment on sensory motors how modifying individual behavior can effect the entire system. This idea is universal for any system design.
Braitenberg’s Vehicle experiment starts out with a heat sensitive sensor wired to a motor that drives a wheel in a straight line. The higher the heat, the faster the motor, vise versa. When two sets of sensor and motor bundles together and each sensor is given different amount of heat, the bundle turns. And by reconfiguring the internal connections, it changes the behavior of the bundle (system) as a whole.
I recreated this experiment in XNA and hacked a XBOX 360 controller to simulate the sensors. Instead of heat sensors used in the original experiment, I used photodiodes for my own convenience. The hack part is a no-brainer, simply connects photodiodes to the two potentiometers (X and Y axis) of either analog stick and read their values in XNA like one would do with Gamepad object.
