@codeWrapped If wanting to write computer games is your goal you might want to consider what kind of games you want to write and on what platforms you want them to run when selecting a computer language. In the early years of FreeBASIC there were many games written but it has all but died out now. h...

BASIC was my first language on my first computer the TRS80. The attraction I had for FreeBASIC 12 years ago was as a hobby programmer. FreeBASIC was easier to use and read than the C++ I had been using up to then and compiled to fast readable code and also came with innate graphics statements releva...

@jaskin
You are good to go then with the PlanetSquires Forums to help?

@jaskin I rather go to the source and use Win32 API calls directly. It depends on what you are programming and why. I spent time learning to use the Win32 API using C++ but found no advantage over using Visual Basic (at the time) with its GUI editor. I have always rolled my own GUI since the DOS day...

@dodicat I wondered how well you could figure out the shortest path by visual inspection. The human eye is very good at clustering. So I modified your code as I was too lazy to write my own version hope you don't mind. I added a function drawLine() so by clicking each point you could join them up wi...

Both the circle and nearest town algorithms get pretty good results.

@dodicat Many years ago (1984), my late wife and myself and our small dog took a long Summer break in our towing caravan. We ended up near London, and parked up in a site by the edge of Epping forest. My wife got a temporary job, at her trade as bookkeeper, in Woodford Green, I took a job as a milkm...

I have modified Lothar Schirm's code to having a fixed number of towns and when the program is exited the town locations are saved as data statements in townsData.bas to be copied pasted into another version which reads the locations rather than making a new random selection. This data set can be us...

Lothar Schirm A brute force approach rapidly becomes unsuitable as the number of cities increases. I was just curious what the current AI would generate. I asked for a fast good enough solution for the traveling salesman problem and it comes up with your nearest neighbor solution. I added the graphi...

Just for fun I asked AI to generate a solution. I had to modify the solution to make it work and add graphics to display the city layouts. 'MODIFIED CODE GENERATED BY https://deepai.org/chat 'This code generates random cities with x and y coordinates, computes the 'shortest path through all cities u...

Lothar Schirm Works ok for me? When I hit the space bar once I get the circles (towns). Hit the space bar again straight lines join up the towns from red to green circle. Hit the space bar again and another random number of towns at random positions appear. Hit the space bar again and they join up. ...

@neil Thanks for these links to ai chat it has been fun. I thought I would search for links on how these programs could write code from a description and then thought why not ask the AI :) It didn't actually explain how it was done in any detail only that it was done using predefined templates and a...

@neil It amazes me. Until now I haven't really tried it myself as you had to sign up first. Although its responses may only be something to work from it seems promising in the future. I asked it for code for another problem without mentioning the language and it gave me a Python example. I read that...

How is it able to do that? !!! This is what it gave me, #include "fbgfx.bi" #include "math.bi" const SCREEN_WIDTH = 800 const SCREEN_HEIGHT = 600 dim as integer asteroid_size = 10 dim as integer asteroid_x = SCREEN_WIDTH / 2 dim as integer asteroid_y = SCREEN_HEIGHT / 2 dim as i...

@badidea When I watched real ants in the foraging mode (going around and around an area) I marked their paths and saw squiggles. it seems a probability thing where the most probable is forward and varying degrees of veering left or right but the sharper the turn the less likely it happens. When my s...