What is Zenet?
Zenet is a project to monitor instrumented software as it runs and offer programmers the ability to specify repairs of the software should the software specification ever be violated.
It's like specifying exception handling for an entire system's operation.
Zenet for Game Designers
If you're a game designer, this lets you specify negative game experiences and repair them if they occur. You'll be interested in our work on a video game failure taxonomy, which classifies common bugs in games, which Zenet hopes to be able to cover. You'll probably be interested in specifying rules about the game manually, creating a human-readable, machine-enforceable, specification of your game design.
See how Zenet can help game designers.
Zenet for Software Engineers
If you're a software engineer, you'll be interested in Zenet's capabilities as a runtime software-fault monitor that, by virtue of allowing repairs, creates a fault-tolerant system using a distributed, efficient, user-friendly rule-engine architecture. Zenet will also have some learning aspect: whether it learns specifications or repairs is a question that will be answered through the process of research!
An expressiveintelligencestudio Production
Zenet is Yet Another Research Project from the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) in sunny California. It's created by Chris Lewis and advised by Jim Whitehead. We're a rare academic breed that wear both video game research and software engineer hats 1.
Supported by the NSF
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0811865.
Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).2