Post #02 – So How is it Going?

Well my primary goal for this project was to gain further experience related to artificial intelligence and machine learning, and I feel that goal is definitely going to be accomplished by the end, which is awesome. So from a macro view, the project is going great because even if it doesn’t turn out exactly how we want, I have been learning a bunch.

Our team has been communicating very well. Each member is fairly active on our group discord page, with questions being responded to within a 24 hour period. We have also found that our weekly 1-2 hour meetings have been very helpful because so much of this information is new to us. The opportunity to bounce ideas off of each other has been a very productive source of progress. Beyond meetings and message boards, I also created a trello board for the group so that way we can have an active task management board going so everyone is on the same page. This has been helpful in keeping us on track in terms of progress goals and also with topics of conversation during our meetings.

There hasn’t been too much done on the implementation front quite yet, but the code is on the horizon one could say. The group has put a lot of time in researching and understanding what it is that we are trying to build and this week marks the first week where some of us are going to begin coding some of the components. Each of us is going to be working in separate branches while we are working on independent parts of the project, but will look to merge it all together in the coming weeks. Personally, I have taken on writing the reinforcement learning section of the project, which is a pretty major undertaking. I have narrowed down our initial implementation to a Deep Q-learning Neural Reinforcement Network (DQN), and am working on the initial coding of it (part of that huge learning step I was talking about in the beginning).

Overall, I am still optimistic about our groups future and I think that each of use are driven and determined to make a cool project that we all learn from, which is all that I can ask for. If this model doesn’t make us all rich, that is okay. All I can ask for is to bathe in the riches of experience and knowledge.

-Joe