- many of the simulation techniques listed can be used in games, especially if coupled with intelligence.
Music
- pattern matching and search techniques such as genetic programming can be combined with music rules and evolve music.
Some other project ideas from the past..
Dambust - e.g. if there were an earthquake in the Lee valley fault-line and the Iniscarra dam were to burst, what would happen?
Model the consequences of a damburst (effectively a waterfall rapidly eroding the dam and river channel followed by a flood) in a valley using basic nearest neigbour rules based on basic laws of motion: conservation of momentum & energy. Probably best suited to someone who did physics or applied maths at leaving certificate.
Neural Networks for predicting Greyhound race performance.
.. a variation suggested by students who had an interest in dogs.
Stock Market Predictor.
.. neural networks applied to the Irish stock exchange by quite mathematical students, who implemented good standard error minimisation techniques whilst avoiding local minima. For the record, next day predictions were excellent, but accuracy dropped rapidly over the next few days and it failed to spot any spectacular crashes. Today, on average, is the best guess for tomorrow!
Textual Relevance applied to College Calendar rules - as an aid for new students or staff.
This was intended as an aid to students which highlights text of importance or interest to a query they might have. In general, text can be analysed for relevance or similarity at various levels, and clause by clause comparison is probably best. Since there is no foolproof method to understand text, a few ways generally adopted:
1 - Statistical - just word comparisons and hope for the best. This can be extended to identification of common subsequences or phrases.
2 - Parsing - trying to understand the text - both the query and the fact base
3 - Rule inferencing - from the text, try to infer a college rule
i) manually i.e. that someone reads it and programs it into a rule base
ii) automatically - either from 1 or 2 above
Generally, since none of the above are foolproof, it was suggested that rules should initially be input in a formal unambiguous manner, perhaps using a familiar but restrictive GUI. A variation could be used for input of queries, similarly structured in terms of the 'structured information'.