12/8: Class Notes

What did people think of 7 letter word?
Daniel: It was helpful to have previous reports, previous code less helpful
Neha: It was helpful to know the approach of previous years. Knowing what not to do helped to figure out what to do.
EPK: Maybe it would be interesting to repeat multiple projects
Dan: We wasted a lot of time getting an architecture together when we could have been writing the code.
Elba: It was helpful that the first project was text based (and not geometric)
Flavio: It was nice that we could get some basic results quick

Mosquito?
EPK: I liked that it was visual
Daniel: It was interesting that nobody got a good discrete solution
Everyone thought that the competition was fun

Push?
Elba: Everyone kinda plateaued
Yang: It was an interesting game, that models what we see in real life
Neha: The piling was terrible

iSnork?
General consensus - many variables, very complex, quite a bit of room for further work

Most people voted to extend project 4 for next year

12/6 Class Notes

Tournament parameters:

Group 4 will create an extra player that does just danger avoidance, and then comes back to the boat.

D:
30, 40
R:
5, 8, 15
N:
1, 2, 7, 20, 30
Maps:
Lochness
Mines and treasure
G2 benchmark
Lochness, but it's happy, not dangerous
Piranha
Lochness, plus 3 happy creatures of the same species
G5 VERY happy
1 or 2 static happy creatures
Piranha plus a few good creatures
More than 26 species

1 map with very dense wildlife many different species, d=60

We'll narrow this down to 8-10 boards

How many different random seeds?
~100-1000, depending on time it all takes (will maximize # seeds to fit in 4 hr run)

We'll use a different configuration today...
D=40, R=8,N=7, Seed=1,291,659,224,861

G1: 1023
G2: 1591
G3: 1330
G4: 702
G5: 1217
G6: 836
G7: 1153

What did we learn today?
John: Cover the board!
Daniel: We are overly conservative when estimating the number of creatures instantiated
Lauren: We are overly optimistic with the same thing!
Flavio: Better to be home early than to be home late!


Weds: Final code due by noon. Course wrap-up.
Mon: Presentation and report. and peer review

12/1: Class Notes

Schedule update: We are swapping the class wrapup and presentation days. So presentations on the 13th. Course wrapup on the 8th. Final players due at noon on the 8th.

We ran a d30 piranha map:
G5: -887,000; 13 didn't make it home
G1: 35,000
G2: 35,000
Lauren: We stay in the boat until there's no danger in the radius.
Flavio: This is going to keep you locked in the boat!
G3: -21,000
Jesse: We got the max, then we didn't go back, so we lost it all
G4: -1,347,000
Zach: We don't properly avoid danger due to a bug
G6: -71,000; 7 DSQ
You should have a fuzzy condition test to see if you have the max

Mines:
G5: 0
G1: 5740
G2: -156
Whats a good meta strategy to realize that your current strategy needs to be changed?
David: Make milestones, and see if it's taking too long to ge there

Neha: Do path finding through static dangerous creatures

G3: 20740
G4: 1740
Zach: We should be exploring... but retraced our steps for some reason
G6: 1740

Lauren: It's important to have different strategies for static/moving danger.

Lauren: Visiting all of the creatures will be NP-Hard (traveling salesman)
DFed: Just use simple heuristics (see the closest, etc. only need to see 3 of each creature)

G5: 5005
G1: 4785
G2: 5321
G3: 6275
G4: Crash
G6: 5853

11/29 Class Notes

Daniel: If there's something really valuable out there, and getting of the boat may give you some minor penalty, you shouldn't just stay on the boat

We ran on Lochness:

G6 - We have each player explore, left to right, then get stuck on the right. (6000, then -3000 after penalties)
G4: We are using the isnork, but not acting upon it. (3000)
G5: (Neha) - We have some big bugs with handling messages (-71000)
G1: 9000 points. They used the isnork to send messages, but not listen
DFed: Our snorkelers return home after they see everything
Dan: Actually, might be wise to stay out to help spot things
Lauren: But if there's a very high risk of danger, and not much to track, you should go home
G2: (John) - We go home early also. Sending out junk messages for the seaweed, shouldn't be bothering. 11,000 pts
G3: (David) - We use the isnork right, and we do a spiral exploration
G7: We are not using the isnork either. -13,000


G5 Happy trials:
G1: 3050. Mostly random wandering
G2: 3850.
G3: 4300
G4: 2645
G5: -(a lot). Still stuck in random pairs
G6: Still stuck on the right. -9150
G7: 3065

What have we learned?

John: There's a really steep penalty for not making it back on the time. Should we raise it?

We're changing it completely so that if you don't make it back to the boat, your entire score is DSQ'ed

Dan: Is there a "par" for each map?
Yes... 3 of every creature happiness

Eva: We are using huffman coding
Blake: We are sending this as numbers in base 26. 4 or fewer creatures fit in 2 chars, more fit in 3
DFed: You don't need to send the position if you know that the player is always following

EPK: How many divers you have is a very important variable when determining what to follow
Flavio: You need to follow at a distance to make sure you don't get hurt

Nitin: It can be really difficult to handle very dangerous creatures.
John: We should focus on board coverage
Daniel:

For Weds:
Send AND receive messages (and act on them ;))
Everyone gets back to the boat
Feel free to come up with t-shirt ideas. For $8 shirts, we will need to use only 1 color. Full color gets much more expensive (towards $20) and the quality goes down (you end up with iron-on transfers instead of silk-screening)

11/28

DFed will augment the simulator so that snorkelers will see the direction that observed things are facing.

G1 & 4 errored.

G5 had a bad danger avoidance code
g6 had some big bugs too

What have we observed so far?
PK: Avoid the danger
Nitin: Is there some complexity in avoiding dangerous creatures?
EPK: The best way to avoid a creature is to swim perpendicular to it (Blake's idea)

Can you compute an expected score?
Is it worthwhile to do a complete simulation on each turn?
Daniel: You could do this probabalistically
Should we jump in the water for short periods of time and come back, ever?
Daniel: Note that if there are a lot of static creatures, it's essentially a maze solving problem

Blake: Players might want to keep track of a map (particularly of static) creatures to help them return

Eva: We need to have some way of interrupting a full message to deliver something super important
Neerja: You could just follow what's so important for 1-2 moves while sending what you were already, and then send the important one
DFed: We have no problem fitting everything that we need in 3 chars.
Blake: We encode different things depending on how big R is
Jesse: If there are a lot of things, it's not useful to broadcast this

DFed: We're sending (species)(location)(etc)
Daniel: This is good because then you know what you are looking for, and it can be interrupted better.
DFed: Even if you send stale messages, we can infer when it was sent and from where
Arcahna: Snorkelers should permute themselves around the board to see different things

Daniel: The isnork is really only useful for things that are rare and/or high value

For monday:
Make it better. G1 and g4 certainly shouldn't crash again :)
Have thoughts about the iSnork vocabulary

11/22: Class Notes

G2 submitted a fairly sparse board, benchmark, which has a few high scoring items
Daniel: This is interesting because it forces you to have to spread out
Lauren: Boards with few creatures are "easy" in that you have less creatures to find to maximize your score.

We computed that the maximum ideal dimension is 80, after which point you'll get stuck at the edges
Blake: Bigger R's shrink the board
Daniel: R=D is a sanity check
Lauren: Why not use 2 way communication with the isnork?
DFed: How do you do that without interference? Maybe you have some sync time where everyone agrees to give some sort of state update.
Daniel: We don't need to have people tell us what they need if they are instead telling us what they have seen
Flavio: But we may need to know the ID of the creature too, not just what it is
John: In a dangerous environment, a conga line makes sure that you know a safe path back to the boat
What happens if your conga line is interrupted?

Did we miss discussing anything?
John: Whether creatures are helpful or just provide a minimal benefit

We'll make a map with 5-10 of each creature, filling at least half of the cells (all benign, same happiness)

Zach: Use something like huffman coding to make important messages come out faster, and less important ones take longer

What features would we want to encode in the isnork?
John: Add a 27th letter, the null character
DFed: We need to know the radius at which you saw something

For Weds:
Some players that respond to the boards we saw today.
Be ready to talk about how you are going to use the isnork.

11/17: Class Notes

Today we are starting project 4. Hooray!

Group assignments:
Group 1: DFed, Daniel & Flavio
Group 2: Lauren, Nitin & John
Group 3: Jesse, David & Eva
Group 4: Zach, Blake & Elba
Group 5: Yang, Neha & Archana
Group 6: Pilunchana, Neerja & Neetha
Group 7: Andrew, Dan & Elizabeth

DFed: We should use a 2 character message instead of a 1 character message
Lauren: If you have a buddy, then you can have 2 people sending out messages from the same observation.
DFed: Would it be smart for all of the snorkelers to go in the same direction?
Zach: It's high risk
Neha: We should be sophisticated with our coding to show the different kinds of sealife
Eva: We should come up with a good way to do path finding?
Daniel: Each player should have a long term goal of where they want to explore
Archana: We can pre-determine different roles for each snorkeler
Should one stand still?
Lauren: It may be more useful to hang out in the middle than get stuck in a corner
Zach: Depends on how many players you have.
DFed: Fanning out in all different directions isn't great because when you actually want to backtrack to see what someone else said, you have to go all the way over there

For Monday:
An interesting configuration for an ocean.
An initial player attempt.