Deep Silver

After the phenomenal success of computer-chess I decided to create a computer that could play pinball. It's name, Deep Silver.

The basic idea was this. Get a web cam, place it on top of your back glass, feed its output to a computer program and let this drive your flippers.

First thing I did was too solder a cable to connect the serial port of my computer to the flipper driver board of a Theatre of Magic. I wrote a program to drive the flippers from my computer keyboard. It worked, I could play a real game of pinball using the left and right shift buttons, although I must admit having to place the keyboard on the back glass. I also couldn't stop nudging, but my confidence grew.

Then I bought a web cam, placed it on a tripod and linked it to my computer. Now I could play a game from behind my desk.

The software bit was the hard part, although I know how to speak C++. First problem was to trap the output from the camera from my program. This was solved thanks to U-turn-on-sense who provided a driver. This I fed to a neural network with an input matrix the size of my camera's resolution. It had an output matrix of 4, the for the left en two for the right flipper button. (Remember flipper buttons have two active states, the second being for the upper flipper).

A neural network has to be trained. So I dedicated two keyboard buttons to give a real time "expert opinion"  during a computer game. B for bad, M for good (M was better located than G). Training had several stages. First I learned the program to flip either flipper every so often, then only if the table lights were on . Then I slowly thought it how to react to the ball. Last night I thought it how to avoid the outlanes and to react to the dot matrix and game lights.

Would you believe it, it all works. I started a game before writing this message and it's still playing. I can't read the current score as it is shooting the center ramp all the time, but the combo value is 2.318.852.000

As I see no commercial use for this application, the software can be downloaded for free from my website. You will have to create a cable yourself but schematics are on the help menu . Go to The download pages

Aswin