Learning Machine Learning with Aston

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...

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...

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. ...