Course Projects

Vision course project

Extracts colors of the Rubik's cube from video in real time

vision detection tracking

Machine Learning course project

I wrote a small library for training Restricted Boltzmann Machines

learning rbm nerual network

Animation course project

Attempt to use classic Machine Learning techniques to learn a controller for a physics based biped.

physics controller machine learning

Learning Visual Saliency

Can we collect a database of gazes using an eyetracker, and then build a data-driven classifier for visual saliency? (ongoing course project)

vision saliency machine learning

Smoke Volume Acquisiton

Project involved shining coded light into smoke, observing results with a high speed camera, and using the video to recover smoke density in 3-space

graphics

Extracurricular projects for fun

Sketcher

Simulates an artist drawing an image

vision

Script Bots

Evolutionary Artificial Life simulation of robots who interact with each other.

artificial life evolution

Tetris AI

Program that can learns to play Tetris

artificial intelligence

4 Seasons Animation

Pretty animation of a tree through 4 seasons

computer graphics animation

iPhone app

I had a chance to develop an iPhone app. More than 1000 downloads, and >$1000 money made! :)

iphone

Mini-projects

Tetris AI

The computer "learns" to play tetris! The program has caused quite the stir on YouTube, with almost 50 000 video views :)



Details

The AI works as follows: first, a Breadth-first search finds all positions and orientations that the current block can be dropped in.
Then, A linear score function is computed for every position/rotation and the argmax move is selected. The features used in the weighted sum are hand-designed: For example, one feature returns a number from 0 to 1 based on how high the position that is being evaluated is. Another feature may evaluate how well the block fits into its surroundings, etc. The weights that are given to every feature are evolved using a genetic algorithm.

The AI can also look ahead to the next piece, by computing the best score for it, given a hypothetical placement for the current block.

The AI can usually last on the order of 10-20 minutes before it dies. The longest I've seen it go was about 2 hours. Unfortunately, it is known that Tetris cannot be "solved", because there exists at least one known sequence of blocks that forces a loss.

artificial intelligence