CSCI-903 Final Project

Your final project is to design and implement an “intelligent agent.” There are three components:

1. Design and Implement Your Agent

   Ideally, you would build a robot that climbs mountains or solves Rubic’s Cube in 3 seconds.

   But if you do that in two weeks, it might make the people who made those other robots feel bad, so we will scale back the scope of our project a little bit.

   At this point, you have an idea of the sorts of things Teagueduino (and Arduino) controllers can do, you have a sense of what information theory is, you have a sense of what artificial intelligence is, and you have some idea of how information theory, probability theory, and artificial intelligence relate to one another.

   Drawing on what you have learned in this class, your assignment is to design a device that uses the Teagueduino board to perform some sort of control function that involves decision making. The design is to include both the mechanical structure of the device, the arrangement of inputs and output devices connected to the Teagueduino, and the rules the controller is to follow in order to make its decisions.

   As we saw in class, it’s not practical to make a truly mobile device because of the need to connect to a power source, at least if motors are involved. (A battery can be used if the device doesn’t need to operate motors. The mechanical design could be based on craft supplies (carboard, tape, glue, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, etc.), or could involve machining or woodworking, like the two-wheel device used in class.

   This part of the assignment will be evaluated based on how well the design reflects the topics of the course, creativity, “implementability,” and how much of it you actually complete, in decreasing order.

2. Write a Report on Your Agent

   Your written report should be as long as necessary (1,000 to 10,000 words) to address the questions in the following list clearly. You can use the questions as headings, but you will receive more credit for this part of the assignment if you (a) put the questions into a logical order other than the one given here, and (b) create a coherent piece of writing rather than a sequence of answers to questions.

   • The nature of the intelligent agent you have designed. (What does it do?)
   • How is (or would) your agent be implmented?
   • How is your device similar to and different from other devices you might know of?
   • What are the inputs and outputs of your agent?
   • What is it about this device that makes it an “intelligent agent?”
   • What role does information theory and encoding play in the design of the device?
   • What decisions and choices did you have to make during the design process?
   • How much of the project did you actually complete?

   Attach the code that you wrote for the project as an appendix to your paper. You must include working code for at least some subset of the project.

3. Present Your Project in Class

   Prepare a presentation/demonstration of your agent, to be delivered to the class during the time scheduled for the final exam: May 22 from 1:45 to 3:45 pm. The presentation may be from 5 to 10 minutes long, and may consist of any combination of demonstration, explanation, and prognostication. PowerPoint allowed, but deprecated.

TBD