What is your idea for a good AI project for a group of students?

Question

There are two courses: “AI” and “AI in Games” - 15 students for 15 weeks. I want to keep them motivated and creative. I know that I need some kind of competition (obviously for the last year). Maybe something like Marathon Match or ICFP. I need a good visualization, so it would be great if it already existed. One idea was to write AI for “The Battle for Wesnoth,” but I guess it's a bit boring. Another Go game. But it is too complicated.

What are your ideas?

This will be work in groups of 3 students over 15 weeks.

Answer 1

MIT holds a contest called BattleCode .

BattleCode is a real time strategy game. Two teams of robots roam the screen, managing resources and attacking each other with different types of weapons. However, in BattleCode, each robot works autonomously; a Java virtual machine is running under the hood, loaded with a program for a team player. Robots in the game communicate on the radio and must work together to achieve their goals.

Teams involving one to four students will receive BattleCode software and a specification of the rules of the game. Each team develops a player program that will be launched by each of their robots during BattleCode matches. Participants often use artificial intelligence, pathfinding, distributed algorithms and / or network communications to write their player. In the final tournaments, autonomous players fight each other in a dramatic duel. The final rounds of the MIT tournament are held in front of a live audience, and the best teams receive cash prizes.

_{(source: mit.edu )}

BattleCode in action.

Essentially, you are provided with MIT's BattleCode software, and your students can program AI for their robots. They have a set of tests, so you can practice launching autonomous bots on your own in the training arena. By the end of the semester, they can take part in the open MIT tournament , where they compete with their robot robots in the fight against schools across the country. Up to $ 40,000 is raffled in cash and prizes, and also has the right to boast of victory.

If you want to teach them AI , Pioneering , Swarm Intelligence , etc. I can’t come up with a more interesting way.

Let the best AI bot win!

Answer 2

Wii gesture recognition using hidden Markov models .

Answer 3

I would not count Go. It's hard to figure out for Go AI to compete with the best players in man, but the simple Go rules (compared to Chess) make the game relatively easy to write AI. Your students' programs should compete with each other, and not against Dan level players. See Introduction to Computer Field and related Internet resources for many Go programming resources.

Answer 4

I think it’s nice to choose a topic that is complex enough so that it is not completely resolved, but allows the user to see its value in the real world and not so much a toy problem. My suggestion would be this:

• Word segmentation problem (for example, convert "iamaboy" to "i'am boy")
• The meaning of the meaning of the word (for example, "an apple is pleasant to eat" - is an apple a fruit or a company?)
• Optical character recognition

What I just listed are some of the basic elements of natural language processing. If your students are much more technically inclined, you can go to the next level and let them solve the problem of machine translation.

Answer 5

Empire , addictive as you like , is the open D version ( 1 and 2 ) and the not-so-free C ++ version .