Just saying, but... already CPUs with many millions of transistors haven't got the processing power for truly elaborate AIs. How can one even hope to accomplish that in DF?
One can accomplish anything with an awesome beard.
(And yes, I have a beard. Hail Urist!)
Things are moving along quite nicely. The gears that I decided to link up first are the ones that determine what character will be displayed:
The 15 blue gears there when engaged send power to the 15 pumps above, activating pressure plates that control the 15 hatches that make up 1 display tile. An average of 21 linkages have been made to each of the gears to support 44 potential characters, that's 317 individual linkages per 15-gear section, and I have to do that 32 times (not including the A.I. sections).
Yeah, it's going to be rough, but it won't be as bad as it sounds. While I was linking all the characters I was recording macros for each. I only need to load a characters' macro, execute it on the appropriately labeled pressure plate and repeat for each 15 gear section. (I probably would have given up on this a long time ago if it wasn't for macros...)
I made a copy of the game file to test the characters, making sure I linked them correctly. I got power sent down to the section I just made and even got water down in the channels. The keyboard isn't hooked up yet so my dwarves have to man (dwarf?) the pumps for each character. When characters' pressure plate is activated, the letter 'A' for this example, power gets send to the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 11th and 14th gears, sending power to these pumps:
These then activate more pressure plates that open their respective hatches on the display resulting in this:
AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!