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| build | Create a Studiola plugin | |
| historic | Convert historic source files from Shift-JIS to UTF-8 | |
| src | Create a Studiola plugin | |
| src-zig | Create a Studiola plugin | |
| Studiola | Create a Studiola plugin | |
| tests | Create a Studiola plugin | |
| tools | Excelsior! | |
| .gitignore | Excelsior! | |
| build.zig | Create a Studiola plugin | |
| build.zig.zon | Create a Studiola plugin | |
| circuit.json | Excelsior! | |
| CMakeLists.txt | Create a Studiola plugin | |
| LICENSE.txt | Excelsior! | |
| README.md | Add screenshots | |
| studiola-plugin.toml | Create a Studiola plugin | |
The SYNTELLI System
(c) 2026 Nick Porcino
SyntelliSoccer was a demonstration proof of concept of using neural networks to control toys and games developed at Bandai's Strategic Research and Development Division in Kanda, Tokyo during 1990-1991.
Syntelligence itself, a portmanteau of "Synthetic Intelligence", was a system that merged ideas of Boids, Vehicles, Subsumption, and Neural Networks into an architecture of agent control light enough to effectively run on the simple microcontrollers of the time.
The combined simulator and design environment allowed prototyping and iteration of behaviors in a reasonably useful environment, before taking the time-consuming step of burning control software to an EEPROM for use in toy and robotic prototypes.
The software as recovered here demonstrated the principles via a soccer game pitting a "syntellinet" against a procedural team. The blue team was named the Canada team, because the principal researcher, Nick Porcino was from Canada, and since Takahashi Norio was his collaborator (appearing as NOP, NT, and TN throughout the recovered code), the procedural control team he wrote was named the "Japan" team.
For a deep dive into the architecture of the SYNTELLI system, see Syntelligence (1990).
This Repo
The original software has been recovered from 3.5" floppies, and reconstructed with the aid of an LLM. The assistance included setting up a zig build system, initial classes to correspond to the concepts in the original C code, and reverse engineering of file formats and transliteration of Shift-JIS encoded Japanese comments.
Acknowledgements
Special Thanks to Takahashi Norio-san who was my mentor at Bandai when I worked as the first foreign employee in the research and development department. Thanks to Suzuki Jumpei-san, our division lead, and my other team mates. Thanks to Bandai's CEO, Yamashina Makoto-san who believed in my vision and gave me the resources to explore cutting edge technology in his laboratories, and helped steer me through the complexities of Japanese corporate culture.