What is your idea for a good AI project for a group of undergraduates?

Question

There are two courses: "AI" and "AI in Games" both 15 students for 15 weeks. I want to keep them motivated and creative. I know I want some kind of competition (obvious for the latter course). Maybe something like Marathon Match or ICFP. I will need good visualization, so it would be great if it already exist. One idea was to write AI for "Battle of Wesnoth", but I guess it's to diverse / boring. Another game of Go. But that's too hard.

What are your ideas?

It will be work in groups of 3 students for 15 weeks.

Answer 1

Wii gesture recognition using hidden markov models.

Answer 2

I wouldn't count out Go. It's computationally hard for Go AI to compete with top human players, but the simple rules of Go (compared to Chess) make it a relatively easy game to write AI for. Your students' programs only need to compete against each other, not against Dan level human players. See An Introduction to the Computer Go Field and Associated Internet Resources for a lot of Go programming resources.

Answer 3

I think it's a good idea to select a theme both challenging enough that it can't be completely solved, yet allows the user to see the value of it in the real world and not so much a toy problem. My suggestion would thus be:

1. Word segmentation problem (e.g. convert "iamaboy" to "i'am a boy")
2. Word sense disambiguation (e.g. "The apple is nice to eat" - The apple is a fruit or a company?)
3. Optical character recognition

What I just list down is some of the more basic stuff of natural language processing. If your students is much more technically inclined, you can probably take it to the next level and let them tackle the problem of machine translation.

Answer 4

Empire, it's addictive as whatever and there are open source D versions (1 and 2) and a not quite free c++ version .