Week 1 - Project Preparation
The first week of the project was fairly simple. I just needed to decide on a project name and set up a website to host future devlogs. How bad could it be? laughs nervously
Project Name
I spent a great deal of time trying to decide on an appropriate name for this project. I am a huge fan of Greek Mythology, so I obviously turned to it immediately when trying to decide on a cool lore driven name for my project. After a few hours of research I came up with a few possibilities: Project Athena, Project Ultron, Project Pandora, and Project Talos.
The first name that came to mind was Project Athena. Athena being the goddess of knowledge and wisdom made her a fitting inspiration for a project involving artificial intelligence. However, I quickly realized there were many projects that already existed with that name. As such, securing a unique project space and a domain name would be difficult.
Next my mind rushed to Ultron that super intelligent AI created by Tony Stark in the MCU. His name was relevant in pop culture and super well known, but it had an almost evil implication to him leading to me deciding against using it.
Pandora was a name inspired by the Greek myth of the artificial woman created by Hephaestus. She was considered the original truely intelligent AI agent from Greek lore. However, later versions of the story portrayed her as an innocent woman who open an evil box, which was appropriately named after her. Since the second story is the more well known one, it would probably lead to more confusion than anything else. Also that doesn’t even account for the issue of the music streaming service of the same name.
Finally, I stumbled upon the story of the Talos. According to the story, Talos, the bronze man, was created by Hephaestus and programmed to guard the island of Crete from invaders. Even though he was not considered a truely intelligent AI, he was still considered to be the first “artificial intelligence” mentioned in Greek lore. As such, I still felt he would be a fitting inspiration and namesake for my project.
Project Website
The rest of the week involved creating this website using GitHub Pages. I spent some time searching for a theme I liked and customizing it to fit my style using Jekyll. I also went ahead and reserved the domain name ProjectTalos.com and set up domain forwarding.
Finally, I rewrote this devblog to accurately document the process from Week 1. Initially, it simply had filler from the Jekyll Tutorial. In the process I had to recreate the post file, resulting in the original post date being inaccurate. The original post was made on September 7, 2020.
Well, that is all for this week. Check back next week for another update.
Thanks for reading!