Back to Blogging with a vengeance ?

Well, not quite. I have an unfinished business to settle down first, so please bare with us. Apologies for failing to post anything for some time now...

However, we have not wasted time doing entirely nothing in last month or so. For one, we are doing not too badly at the Google AI competition .

Current ranking page is in here.

Secondly, our long promised online free gaming site is just around the corner! You can already have a glimpse at the Araaya web site. Official launch will happen really soon too!

Thirdly, we have done some porting of our games into Android platform lately and doing same for iPhone. For this we got 2 phones, an iPhone 4 and a Motorolla Atrix. We have been playing with these 2 great phones lately which are easily the best in their categories at present, that I thought it would be useful for few to write a review and a comparison on them.

My last post about a similar subject (about Toyota Prius) was welcomed by many and judging by comments have helped few people... so probably I should do that more. After all, how often do we bloggers get a chance to actually help someone, (except for helping readers to kill their time) :-)

So, that (on iphone and Android) would probably be our next post. Meanwhile, some of interesting games from the AI competition can be found in this link. I'm regularly update that page with game links. Stay tuned....

Games, Algorithms and Code

Thought of publishing a new post with links to some of our earlier posts to help the users who have joined us from syndicate sites we have recently got listed into.

BTW, all algorithms, some code we produce, analysis in solving some gaming puzzles etc are in the coding blog which is iq-games Our starting puzzle Towers of Hanoi was just complete there (with a staggering series of 10 posts!) That series takes one deep into the world of Hanoi Towers with general cases (what we know most is just a one specific case of the puzzle), multiple towers etc After analyzing the puzzle and sharing ideas and explaining of algorithms, finally the source code has also been shared there, have fun! For absolute beginners on towers of Hanoi, this link should be the starting point. Those who already know the puzzle and the code to solve the basic case of it, can start from here to dig deep. More game analysis, algorithms and code for different games/puzzles will appear in this blog, stay tuned....

At this blog we have discussed about the future of Thin Client and Javascript. We placed our bets on web application to over take desktop applications and similarly languages like Javascripts together with technologies like HTML5 and AJAX are poised to become next big things in the programming world. Like to know more ? hop in!

Newest programming Language! Ceylon!! will it overtake Java ? what's the secret reasoning behind naming it as Ceylon ? (of all names for god's sake!) read Here to find more...

Can meditation help improve programming skills ? What's in common with programming meditation and Chess ? You will find few more questions and even fewer answers in here.

Finally, what we are about. The Free for all online gaming site!

Online Games of a different kind - and for free !

We are developing an online gaming site!

People could challenge others and play games online, keep records, play and organize tournaments, play matches with selected opponents, replay their past games, pass their university exams, complete their office work etc.  It would be so much fun! (except for last 2 items in the previous sentence).

To make it even more interesting, there will be few AI driven computer players as well. With ratings, rankings leader-boards, records etc

What will be the difference of our site with other such online gaming sites in abundance ?

Well, there will be few :

1) Our site will not require users to install any additional plugins or other software to play. No flash, flex, java applets etc They will just work from a "vanilla" web browser  just out of the box! no hassle, very light weight and universal. Yea it really will work from everywhere even on browsers running on iPhone, Android, iPads etc

2) The games running on the site will not be just animated flash games where users are just required to time their mouse clicks/drags. We believe a computer game could and should do lot more than that! Our games would mainly be board and puzzle, they would have classic games as well as few home cooked one but all would require some series analytical/calculation and strategic thinking from the players. There would be AI computer players for each and every game! Typically these games would be good for brains (comes under the category of IQ Enhancers) while fun to play!

3) It would be Free to play. It would be fast, lightweight and will not bother your system or browser performance. No hassle!

Can we achieve all that at once? We believe yes! and very soon we all will be witnessing that and playing with each other!!

So, who would be paying.. where will the money comes from ?

There are few plans. We might go for few sponsored on site ads, or may be there will be a little "donate" sign with a picture of a hungry programmer (kidding) in a corner, or may be there will be even cooler fantastic feature set for subscribed users.

Or may be non of above!

We will also be developing mobile versions for games in the site which prove to become more popular than the others. (hopefully all of them!) Some of these mobile versions will be free for all to play while few others might appear in various app stores. If it looks like there are enough players who think it's worthwhile to buy those games from app stores then, I guess we don't need to put adds in our gaming site after all!

So in short, we will leave the money problem open for the time being, there are various options we could take judging by how things will proceed.

For the time being, let's just say that we could play some very interesting, addictive and challenging games online with friends, totally free!

In the next post we will have few sneak peaks on what those games exactly are... We would love to know what you think. Who knows, if you have a cool request to make, we might just be able to deliver that for you!

Like to play a game ?

(image source from : http://frenchboxing.blogspot.com)