Final Project

It's time to begin thinking about your final project! You can choose to do essentially anything inside the area of AI, so long as I approve it in advance. Submit a proposal of no longer than one page telling me what you want to do. You should have enough detail to convince me that you've given it some thought. You can build on material we do in class, or you can use it as an opportunity to learn about subject matter we don't have time to cover.

Make sure that when you submit your final project, you also submit an explanation of what you have done, how I should run your code, and how I should interpret your results. This does not need to be long. It should merely prevent a problem I've had in the past: students have submitted work that either I can't run, or it runs but I can't figure out what it's doing.

Here is a list of some projects that people have done for for this class in the past. In the past, when I haven't provided this list, students have begged me for suggestions. In other past years, when I have provided this list, students agonized and felt compelled to come up with a project that wasn't on it. That was their choice, not mine -- it is TOTALLY WONDERFUL AND NOT BAD if you decide to do one of the projects on this list! Keep in mind that I vary the topics a bit each year and the order that I cover them, so we may not have covered some topics yet in this list. Similarly, there are topics we may have covered that you may not find in this list. Some of these sound harder than they are; others seem deceptively simple, but require significant amounts of work at the end to actually make them work properly.

• Computer game players: Go, Poker, Scrabble, Magic: The Gathering, Mastermind, Cribbage, Pokemon Battle Simulation (be careful, shouldn't be a rehash of Othello)
• Reinforcement learning in playing Bridge
• Computer puzzle solvers: Minesweeper, mazes
• Pac-Man with intelligent monsters
• Automated 20-questions player
• Paper on planning
• Neural network spam filter
• Learning neural networks via genetic algorithms
• Solving neural networks via backprop
• Box pushing agent (competing against an opponent)
• Motion planning via A*
• Evolving Othello strategies

Here's a list of topics that didn't work so well:

• Too complicated games: Risk, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Chess, Dominion, Battle Simulation
• Got too focused in making game work
• I sometimes had trouble running the game
• Game was often incomplete
• Didn't have time to do enough AI
• Some of these have been submitted by other people where they did work, but they were big projects
• "My really cool idea that I'm telling you, it's awesome, but I just can't really explain it"
• Simulated ant colonies
• Bugs swarming for heat
• Emergent ants via game of life
• Finding paths through snow
• Stochastic graph navigation

What to turn in

1. Your project work.
2. A readme file explaining what you've done, how to run your code, and some documentation on how to use it. A problem that regularly occurs is that students submit projects that look like a lot of work has gone into them, but I can't figure out how to use them or what they're really doing. This document can be as long or as short as you feel is necessary to put me in a place where I can appropriately grade your project. I will not grade this writeup directly, but if you do a good job on it, it will likely put me in a better place for understanding your project.

Have fun!