Steal This Idea

This blog post will exist as a living document of ideas – some very fleshed out, some barely more than a concept – which I would love to implement if I had 15 of me. Unfortunately, there’s just the one (for now) and I don’t have time to work on any of this. As such, please take these ideas and run with them; if you make them and charge for them, I will throw money at you.

I completely rescind any rights to these ideas. You are free to implement them in any form you wish. I just want to see these happen.

Mario Maker clone #

Mario Maker is an awesome game, but by its nature it’s limited to Wii U (and kind of, almost 3ds. But not really) and thus the audience is even more limited. Additionally, I think there’s some really fun stuff that could be done regarding visual scripting to make this powerful and awesome.

I actually started work on something like this a while back but abandoned it due to a lack of time. If you want the existing code, shoot me an email and I’ll push it all up to Github. My pitch/plan: https://gist.github.com/daeken/70e40b3ef818bf025fd394bc9cde1756

De-dithering Images #

The images used in many old games are dithered to hell and back. This was great for storage space optimization and playing nicely with the limited color palettes, but hasn’t aged particularly well. I think it might be possible to train an AI to reverse the dithering process pretty effectively.

Take a ton of modern game screenshots, pass them through a target dithering algorithm, then train the AI on this dataset. That would likely get you something where the model can make an educated guess as to the original colors. It won’t be perfect, but I bet it would give you good results.

Extreme Correlation IDS #

Take a web application/service/whatever. At every point where data changes hands (browser <-> web server, web server <-> database, web server <-> ZeroMQ, etc etc) send the transaction info over to a centralized machine. Associate a tag with each client or request. Train a model on what the expected flow for the application/service is, so that it can find odd requests.

Because you have data on every point, you could almost certainly find SQL injection, XSS, path injection, and way more. This would need to be injected into every layer, but it could provide insane power. You could even prevent attacks in realtime.

AI-based Math Teacher #

Imagine you have a bunch of home-schooled 5th graders. Using a combination of natural language processing, knowledge bases, prewritten content, and exercise building algorithms, teach them math.

In the background, have a set of human teachers. If the AI hits a point where it’s unsure what’s going on, the teacher steps in and helps. The AI learns from this and human intervention should tend towards zero.

Cross-Platform UWP #

Microsoft’s UWP is awesome. If there was a cross-platform implementation, that would be awesome++.

This is something I still may implement, just because it would be so valuable.