AI Challenge

AI Challenge is an interesting, Google-sponsored multi-agent systems contest, that looks a lot like a competition held for a course I followed last year. Up to 8 teams of ants are pitted against each other on random maps, and have to explore, gather food and must plan and cooperate intelligently to defeat their rivals.

I was really compelled to join the competition, but rather late to discover it. Moreover, I was just too busy with other work. Maybe next time!

Euler Project

Problem 19: How many Sundays fell on the first of the month during the twentieth century?

Problem 24: The lexicographic permutations of 0, 1 and 2 are:
012 021 102 120 201 210

What is the millionth lexicographic permutation of the digits 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9?

Problem 60: The primes 3, 7, 109, and 673, are quite remarkable. By taking any two primes and concatenating them in any order the result will always be prime. For example, taking 7 and 109, both 7109 and 1097 are prime. The sum of these four primes, 792, represents the lowest sum for a set of four primes with this property. 

Find the lowest sum for a set of five primes for which any two primes concatenate to produce another prime.

Just some examples of questions posed by Project Euler, a list of 373 mathematical programming exercises (and counting).

Some are quite challenging, some are rather easy. But with the easier ones it's often still fun to find a solution that's nice and efficient. And a 'good' solution should give the answer in less than a minute. The number of Sundays in the 20th century, from the example above, happens to be *very* simple to approximate accurately, by just taking 1/7th of the total number of days.

I challenged myself to solve them all in one month. So far I've been working in Python, but maybe I can use this as an excuse to learn some new languages. Current status: 22 down, 314 to go!

Update November 2011: Well, one month was just a little overoptimistic. But I've made slow but steady progress, having currently solved nearly a hundred problems. They do get a lot more difficult than the examples I gave though.

Finally completed a big Object Tracking project!

That was quite a lot of work (several weeks of Matlab programming), but also really fun. Together with a classmate I implemented a so-called mean-shift tracker, allowing us to follow objects in video.

Here's an example, showing how our object tracker finds his Nemo.



Now I can *finally* have a little vacation and get back to a game of Europa Universalis 3...