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April 24 Technical Journal

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Triumphs: One area of advancement in our project has been our working with Mr. Lee and one of his students to develop a UI (user interface) for our dots and boxes game. Before this, we were playing through the PyCharm terminal so this is a step forward. The first version of the UI is depicted below. Other progress we made was in the integration of our Q-learning work with the Monte Carlo search tree. The Q table would be used instead of random rollout in the Monte Carlo. We also completed the Problem Statement and Background sections for our official report. Preliminary user interface for the dots and boxes game Struggles: Because some people were out due to illness and college visits, some progress was slowed down. Our plan had been to transfer our Q-table into the Monte Carlo Search Tree but formatting differences resulted in incompatibility. As a result, a new Q-table had to be made for the Monte Carlo. The generation of the Q-table (part depicted below) was also an i...
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April 10 Technical Journal

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Code: Working right now as sort of a middle man between the Q learning and code sides, I was helping out a bit with the code as well since the last technical journal on March 13. While I am still mainly focused on the Q learning side, I worked with Edmond on how to improve user interaction with our game. This would come in the form of changing how the lines are inputted. Our current game requires us to input coordinate points to create lines and our new idea is to designate certain coordinates' pairings as a number (depicted below). For example, the line connecting (0,0) and (1,0) is 1. The pattern would be like a zig zag. Q Learning Algorithm: Continuing on the reinforcement learning look into the Q learning algorithm, Connie and I were working with code we got off of Github which stored Q values in a Q table file. Running it over the period, a statement of "Kolo #,#" was printed. The number started off very unbalanced with the first at 0 and the second at 99. Ove...
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March 27 - April 3 Journal

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Because we just did a journal last week, this journal may be a bit shorter. For the Caltech visit last Thursday, issues with the bus resulted in us leaving at 12:50 instead of 12:30. This probably stemed from Club Rush happening that day and the closed-campus policy. The bus, however, left a tad earlier than 12:50 so we left Connie at school for this visit. Because we arrived around 20 minutes late, Dr. Hassibi had left. This visit also conflicted with Robotics' Idaho competition so only Robert, Puja, and I were at Caltech.  At Caltech, we spent our time brainstorming how our end of year presentation would be done. We concluded on an idea of a funnel, going from the larger concepts into our specific project. We would have a section on the different concept maps we made as concepts like decision trees and clustering are not super related to dots and boxes. We would then go into our possible project ideas we had. These would include the vape detector, food recommender, etc. ...
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March 13 - March27 Journal

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STEM: I was absent Monday and Tuesday of this week as I was out sick so this journal is mainly going to be about my spring break and what I've done since the technical journal. For the technical stuff, I have begun to move towards a middle job area of helping around both with the q learning with Robert and Connie and our game code with Puja, Edmond, and Will. I helped with the debugging of the game with an example of us fixing the game crash when wrong inputs are given. Other work includes trying to develop the reward aspect of the Q learning algorithm. Because Will and Edmond are out for a robotics competition, I see myself working with Puja on the code more this week. Spring Break: Over spring break, I went to Italy with my family. We stopped in Rome, Florence, and Milan over the week! Rome was our first stop and we went to see the Colosseum and the Roman Forum which were very historical and impressive. We also visited the Pantheon and I was amazed by the large d...
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March 13 Technical Journal

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Tic Tac Toe Data: We first planned on spending this two weeks looking into datasets for tic tac toe and processing it as a pre-trial for our dots and boxes. What we found and did though, I though was far more insightful. Initially, I was looking around for datasets and found from UVA a dataset for tic tac toe intermediate game states. We thought this could be something as the UCI dataset that we had first come across only gave endgame states. An image of the UVA dataset is posted below. Discussing with Mr. Lee, though, we could not decipher what the non-zero/one numbers represented and decided to move on looking, a sort of dead end. We inferred that -1 and 1 were X and O while 0 was blank. We would eventually later find another way to gather datasets (see Tic Tac Toe Q Learning below). Part of Tic Tac Toe intermediate game states data Tic Tac Toe Monte Carlo: While we had been looking into datasets, it turns out that Will was experimenting with the Monte Carlo search tre...
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Feb 21 - March 7 Journal

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Genetic Algorithm: After briefly looking into SARSA learning, I decided to switch and explore genetic algorithms after receiving a research paper Connie sent me. In this paper, researchers who were teaching an AI to play dots and boxes explained that they had used a genetic algorithm to create their neural network. As a result, I looked into genetic algorithms and was quite excited. This was because I could really connect with the algorithm as it was based on biology that I have studied. The close comparison made this research more tangible to me and I felt that I could relate more to it. The algorithm is explained in my Concept Map video below but it is basically an algorithm that simulates natural selection to choose the most "fit" neural network.  Caltech Visit: We visited Caltech on Thursday though we were short on people. This was because Edmond and Will were at a Robotics competition and Puja was stuck in Chemistry. Nevertheless, Robert, Connie, and I talked w...
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Jan 31 - Feb 20 Journal

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This past week, Robert and I were in Yosemite for the annual trip up to the national park. We were originally supposed to leave on Sunday but snow delayed us to Monday. Because of the heavy snow, the usual Crane Flats campsite was inaccessible so we stayed in Yosemite Valley at the Yosemite Lodge. While this was not our original plane, I actually enjoyed staying in the valley more than at Crane Flats because we were at the center of the many attractions. For example, out hotel was right in front of Yosemite Falls (pictured below). On our first day of activity, the Winter Survival group was split into three different groups and my group and I got together to pass out lunch and discuss our day plans. While waiting for our group counselors from Naturebridge, we played in the snow and had a snow ball fight. After our counselors arrived, we hiked over to Yosemite Falls. At the base of the trail, we went through Spider Cave first. This was a cave made from large rocks that fell from the...
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