I just came back from the demo of my AI (CS 486) project for my prof. I’m really glad I was able to get my program to play go at a decent level. Go is one of the hardest problems in computer game-playing due to many factors. For a while I thought I might have been too ambitious when I proposed to create an agent that can play go. I made a lot of progress when I first started the project back in February, but then I realized the approach I was using was not very good. Then the following weeks after that I hadn’t had the time to work on my AI project very much, so it just sat there taunting me until I finally resumed work just under 2 weeks ago. In th end I found a combination of using an influence function for determining good moves and a linear evaluation function for determining the best move to work well for my very simple go playing agent.
My demo went well today, and my prof liked what I have done so I’m very happy about that. She also told me that if I’m considering grad school I should let her know. So now it seems fairly likely I will be going to grad school sometime in the very near future.
