5 Reasons To Learn Coding | Interesting Coding Projects

here are five reasons why I think you should learn how to code and I also want to show you some of my cool coding adventures this is the first project I want to show you it's called video mater and it's made with game maker why should you learn coding the first reason is because it's supercharges your creativity there are so many creative things you can do with code they actually use this program to animate some of my previous YouTube videos all this program does is it records your mouse movement yeah that some mouse movements recorded now if we hit restart then the previous mouse movement is still there and I can add some new mouse movements on top of that which if you do this a couple of times makes for a very interesting effect all on for a sec this will this will look really really cool in the end ok whatever the next pen is we'll just make a giant scribble bump in the center oh yeah oh yeah that is so fun we can also turn on particle effects let's try to do that

[Music] oh I've never seen that before maybe I can hypnotize you to learn coding with this one thing I've always loved about technology about computers and the digital world is how easy it is to be creative right there are so many creative tools already out there like Photoshop premiere all of that this video sound and image editing software and then if you know how to code on top of that then you really really supercharge that creativity and a whole new universe of creative possibility suddenly starts opening up one of my friends for example wrote a really cool tool that allows you to create these vector graphics directly in unity that's what I mean it can just supercharge your creativity so much a next coding project I'm going to show you will hammer this point home even more shade or texture

ater another GameMaker project and what this does is this basically generates pretty cool abstract seamless textures so this what you see right here is a seamless texture meaning that if you put the same texture right next to it you won't see the gap and the way this works for now is that I just place sprites randomly on this texture and then whenever a sprite is at the edge here I just place the same sprite on the other side as well and that way they fit together perfectly and then from there it gets even cooler because I just apply some random filters to this texture and those filters are seamless filters as well meaning they are filters that don't destroy the seamlessness of the texture okay now just turn black we'll have to restart what is actually nice texture and it's a very simple algorithm as well a randomly chosen kind of blur and then a randomly chosen color effect on top of that random blue + random color effect yeah this is very taxing on the graphics card so I think OBS definitely starts

lagging out a little bit while I generate a new texture I guess let's find a slowness the still works and this is just really addicting just hitting hitting space all of the time and seeing which texture comes up next and then of course there's also a way to export these textures let's let's see if we can find one we're happy with and by the way these are very high-resolution textures as well those are 4k textures with anti-aliasing and I mean even a lot of these starting textures are already quite interesting [Music] it's just so interesting oh my guy could look at this all day randomness can really be so addicting it's crazy and you can see that it's seamless your writers and in the bottom corner this spot just kind of cut off and then it continues at the top here so those are definitely seamless textures works perfectly every single time and [Music]

then sometimes you get just really weird and interesting stuff law okay so interesting to see where this goes okay let's export that and for that I can shut just hit s see that's what I what I meant with it can can supercharge your creativity after I've already been here for for too long look at the head Oh [Music] how does it come from here to here what they're such awesome really really awesome let's have a look at the texture we exported our you can see we have this awesome texture we can use it another project you can use it in Photoshop for example and just as a proof let me move that and then put it here on the other side you can see if it's together absolutely perfectly seamlessly you have no idea where the cut is here and guess what I've played around with this for a

while so let me show you my collection and I can show you some of my favorites that is some artwork some of these are really really amazing actually these come in handy quite quite often you can use them for games you can use them for your various Photoshop projects can slap them in those textures so having a bunch of these seamless perfectly looping textures is like it's really really useful and absolutely something that would not have been possible with without this tool just see it the look at the sheer amount of textures I've created then sometimes just spits out really weird stuff like this or this isn't this crazy and that actually brings me to my second point why you should learn coding coding is like magic you feel like a magician you can just bring cool things into existence and actually if you think about it in the digital world that comparison is not even all that far-fetched you basically are a magician some people write viruses there are the

dark magicians that use some dark magic you don't really understand and then learning how to code is basically learning learning different kinds of magic now I've learned a spell that can bring cool textures into existence like this is why I love digital this is why I love coding magic is possible just not in the real world okay do you want to become a magician then learn coding here's the next project which is on whose Powai I made in unity whose powers a traditional African board game I was playing it with my girlfriend one day and we were wondering what like the best starting move and all that sort of stuff is what the best strategy is so I thought okay let's just ride on AI that can actually figure that out for us I won't go too much into the details of how this works because I've already made a about this I highly recommend you check it out if you're interested in short it's just a very classical min/max AI that basically tries all of the possible moves as many moves as it can and then adjust min maxes and these what the best

possible outcome for you is so this one can depending on the game set can calculate like seven or eight moves into the future in the light game often times 910 moves into the future in a game like whose foul that is absolutely superhuman level like for for a human this AI is not beatable like you you can't beat it it's not possible here these that it will have at least an eight point advantage in seven moves average goes for this move so let's make it go for this move and at the moment yay I place on both sides it's AI versus AI at the moment you can can also turn this AI off and just play yourself also if you're confused how this game works don't be once again just check out the whose power video I made about this apparently the best counter move to that is this one right here but it still predicts it will be an eight-point disadvantage in eight moves so seems like the player who starts out has the upper hand in this game for sure and then you can see the emptier the board gets the faster it can find the best

move this is this absolutely superhuman level there's no way you're gonna beat that so small is such an unpredictable game in every move the game can completely swing in one or the other direction and like really tricky as a human to to figure out what the best moves are and especially thinking multiple moves ahead and most power for a human is like pretty much impossible I can only recommend coding and game engines especially for problems like this where you have to need a visual interface a couple of buttons or something like that yes you could also write that entirely from scratch in Java or or whatever but I feel like coding directly in a game engine even if you're not making a game in a lot of cases that can be very very useful so definitely keep that in mind when coding something and like here it can already see that that it will win in six moves once you see this you know the game's over because there's absolutely no way you can get out of this the maximum amount of moves you will live is six moves one two three four five and games over point

number three why I think you should learn how to code is because it is a very good investment in your future like the world is becoming more and more digital will you need programmers for quite a while now until AI comes along and takes all of her jobs basically but optimistically speaking that will still take a while in a world where everything is becoming increasingly more digital programming is a very useful skill to have it's a valuable skill set that can be monetized that you can make money from and don't even worry too much about which programming language you want to learn and stuff like that because once you know one programming language learning another one is honestly quite simple so just start somewhere start in a game engine start with Java start start with whatever you want doesn't matter once you get the hang of it you've got the hang of it here's another AI project while we're at it and this time it's a self-taught AI basically made a simple game here or a little self learning AI and taught it how to play this game so this AI has been training

how to play this game for about two days three days at 100 times speed so it has played about 200-300 days of this game which for foreign AI is actually not a lot usually you need even more data to be able to play a game effectively and you can tell this is not as superhumanly good as the AI I made before I think the main mistake I made was my simulation can't run fast enough like I can run the game at 100 times to speed but any that faster than that is just not possible so what a little hard to to get enough training in for this AI oh yeah by the way I've made a full video about this AI as well if you're interested in this self learning AI how exactly it works how you can make something like this then check out my video that I made about this and I really like projects like this is a very great learning experience it's make them start fighting so we can have something to look at so those are two AI agents that try to push each other of this platform and then the bar you can see on top of them is their

energy and they can use their energy to boost themselves upwards whoever falls down first loses they're pretty decent they're pretty pretty reasonable at playing the game this project really had to get a basic understanding of how machine learning works what the main issues are how you can make something like this and now let's take control of player a we go now now I can control the character on the left that is me here and on the right is the AI I trained let's see if I can manage to push it off the platform shouldn't be too hard uh-huh oh no oh no I actually really tried okay I lost that one here comes the revenge oh yeah yeah yeah I'm on the top now that is good yes yes hahaha so it doesn't play perfectly it makes some dumb moves here and there and

basically the way it learns is very very simple it just plays against itself or against variations of itself based on evolution basically survival of the fittest we make random changes to the AI and then whoever plays best is the one who's arrives and creates new offspring here I also wrote on a traditional AI like a handcrafted AI that just follows a couple of simple rules and the thing there's a little sad about that is that this AI place the game way we're very better than the self-taught AI well there's just a couple of lines of code and oof this is just oh my god this is giving me such a way harder time basically you're coming back to the platform it's recovering I think I'll still be able to defeat it and what it's doing a much much better job than on the surf today I

oh yeah actually want that but barely that was really close so I think the last experiment we need to do is having the hard-coded AI play against the self-taught AI right here we go so on the left the yellow one is the self-taught AI and on the right we have the hard-coded AI I bet my money on on red on the hard-coded AI to be honest oh yeah that was a weird match just red wins wins this every single time yeah oftentimes just barely but I mean whoever falls down first loses so read definitely coming out on top here most of the time that is very nice very very nice or I mean not so nice not so nice for the self-taught AI the next reason why you should learn coding is like a little bit unrelated to this but it's still this is the most fitting prototype

ahead for this point coding allows you to make games of course making games is super cool you might think yeah but I can just get another coder on my team and even then I have to say the coder is the one who has the most power the most control over the project if your artist quits okay you can replace that artist quite easily you can even make a game without an artist who cares but you cannot make a game without a coder for most game projects the programmers who implements everything who in the end decides what goes in the game and what doesn't of course on the team that works well together and communicates well with each other that shouldn't be the case I'm just saying theoretically the power and the control is with the programmer if you want a certain feature in the game and the programmer says no I don't want to do that that sounds tedious I don't know if I can do that then you can't have that feature where is the fear of the programmer then you can just put it in there well the next project I want to show you I need headphones it is another unity project and it is called audio physics and what it does it basically simulates the movement of a

string in a physical way so this could be a guitar string for example it simulates that movement not in real time a little bit slower than real time because those are a lot of connected dots and then the cool thing is you can place virtual microphones in the space here and I wanna hidden when I hit enter then I can hear the sound that was recorded from those microphones and it is exported so here's the sound we just recorded and I think that is actually the exact same sound just with different microphone positions and basically what the microphone does is for every single one of these little circles it calculates whether that circle is coming closer or further away so for example if we put the microphone on the top here it will sound radically different than putting the microphone on the right here the way the simulation works is also very very simple basically this is just a couple of small spheres

and they are all collected with Springs I'm not using the Unity physics Springs because performance on that would just not be good enough those are null physics objects this just a visualization of something very abstract that is happening under the hood and this is what I've said earlier like doing this in my game engine is very useful sometimes I could have done that entirely without visualisation and pure C sharp or something like that but having a visualization of this is just very very nice we have an invisible force pulling on this ring here as you can see the invisible force posts the string upwards and then as all of these are connected with rings all of these little dots here they're basically moving along with it like like a string would do in real life like this is a very wobbly string we can make this ring a lot shorter let's try making it shorter and that the all of these projects are not exactly designed for user friendliness a lot of times if you want to change something we have to go into the code right here here let's reduce the the number of segments to

half for example now this although very fun to play around with so you know if a smaller string and in theory right a smaller string should make for a higher note let's listen to it [Music] if we place the microphone further away it will probably make for a cleaner sound you're running the simulation again the sounds a bit cleaner pretty cool right and then you can vary some physical properties for example that one on the back here is the damping example let's try what happens if we just make the damping like a lot stronger I wonder how it sounds then like there's just so many cool parameters to play around with we can already see that it stops swinging a lot quicker so that's the same string with more damping coding is

basically a giant sandbox game where you can do whatever you want it has even more possibilities than minecraft it is somewhat easy to learn it is difficult to master it has a lot of challenges and just one tip for you if you want to get the maximum amount of fun out of programming then definitely search for challenges that fit your current skill level mihai Csikszentmihalyi brought a book called flow where he states that things are basically fun and engaging when your skill level fits the challenge as long as you do that coding will be very very fun and rewarding there's another unity project and as you can see I'm constantly cooking up something new this project here isn't finished yet this is still work in progress and this will actually be another animation tool for my youtube videos you can see here this will basically work like PowerPoint whenever I hit space the next slide will show up with the only difference that these slides look very very cool and the transitions are calls very very cool which will hopefully make for for a nice video you know something that's nice to look it almost looks like like a film

trailer or something thing now in the cinema if you want to learn how to code then I definitely recommend you check out my unity tutorial for beginners where we make a couple of simple games that should be a very fun and simple way to get started with coding and even more importantly please wishlist my upcoming game will you snail on Steam it's gonna be a super cool funky action platformer where an AI tries to predict your next move and tries to destroy you which listing is a great way not to miss the launch you don't want to miss out on that gonna be quite a nice discount plus it's quite a simple thing to do and it supports the work I do here on this channel a link to that will definitely be in the description I hope you had I go to time watching this and see on the next one bye