User:Jleldridge

This page is related to Summer of Code 2013

See the list of Summer of Code 2013 Ideas

This is a Summer of Code 2013 student page

Description

Jeffrey Eldridge - AI: Implement a 'total defense' strategy

I believe that the defense of the AI can be improved by aiming to move units into the best position, instead of simply maximizing the number of losses the enemy takes. To this end I propose the application of heuristics that would predict the "best" position to be in on the next turn. One such heuristic would be to maximize the number of spaces between vulnerable units and the attack range of enemy units; since defensive lines force longer paths to be taken to reach a particular space, they would naturally arise if the AI moved all of its units with a focus on this heuristic.

IRC

jleldridge

Questionnaire

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

My name is Jeffrey Eldridge. I am a senior studying computer science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I am the current president of UNCG's chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, and I'm also a member of the STARS Alliance, an organization intended to encourage high school and college students to pursue education and careers in computer science and IT.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

jleldridge27@gmail.com

1.3) If you have chosen a nick for IRC and Wesnoth forums, what is it?

jleldridge on both IRC and Wesnoth forums.

1.4) Why do you want to participate in summer of code?

I wish to participate in the Google summer of code in order to gain experience working with real code bases. I am particularly interested in working on open source projects when I graduate, as well as working with projects that are generally intended for open source operating systems such as Linux.

1.5) What are you studying, subject, level and school?

I am studying computer science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I am a senior.

1.6) What country are you from, at what time are you most likely to be able to join IRC?

I am from Greensboro, North Carolina, USA. During the summer I can join the IRC at any time, but the most reasonable times will be between 8:00am and 11:00pm eastern standard time.

1.7) Do you have other commitments for the summer period ? Do you plan to take any vacations ? If yes, when.

I have no other commitments, and I have no current plans to take a vacation.

2) Experience

2.1) What programs/software have you worked on before?

I have worked on several simple programs for classes, including programs for a challenge course designed to test my ability to write programs using limited resources and having quick execution time. I have also participated in 2 local and 2 regional ACM programming contests, which required quick problem solving with similar program constraints as the aforementioned challenge course.

I have also worked on a few side projects, mostly in java, for fun, which can be found at my github page: https://github.com/jleldridge

2.2) Have you developed software in a team environment before? (As opposed to hacking on something on your own)

I have participated in team programming during ACM programming contests, and during a Software Engineering course. The Software Engineering project that I was a part of was intended to be used by a non-profit organization, Parent to Parent, to replace work that was generally done by hand and on paper. The entire class (roughly 20 students) participated in the project, my portion can be found here: https://github.com/jleldridge/CSC340Project/tree/master/CSC340Project/src/matchingAlgorithm

2.3) Have you participated to the Google Summer of Code before? As a mentor or a student? In what project? Were you successful? If not, why?

I have not participated before.

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

I am not currently involved in an open source project.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

I am a gamer, and have been since I owned an original NES system.

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

I like to play competitively when I can, though I'm not excellent at any particular game. I enjoy the challenge from games with clever AI or obstacle courses, and I love to play against other humans.

2.5.2) What type of games?

I mostly enjoy platformers, RPGs, and strategy games. A few of my favorites are Dark Souls, Starcraft II, and The Binding of Isaac.

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

I prefer human opponents if possible. Barring that I enjoy AI that is either particularly clever, or obstacle course type levels/opponents. I do not enjoy fighting opponents that are simply stronger than the player character and require large amounts of grinding to overcome.

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

I believe a good mix of story and fun gameplay mechanics is necessary for a good game, though fun mechanics can salvage a poor story, and a great story can salvage boring gameplay.

2.5.5) Have you played Wesnoth? If so, tell us roughly for how long and whether you lean towards single player or multiplayer.

I have only just started the tutorial, but plan to play much more.

We do not plan to favor Wesnoth players as such, but some particular projects require a good feeling for the game which is hard to get without having played intensively.

2.6) If you have contributed any patches to Wesnoth, please list them below. You can also list patches that have been submitted but not committed yet and patches that have not been specifically written for GSoC. If you have gained commit access to our repository (during the evaluation period or earlier) please state so.

3) Communication skills

3.1) Though most of our developers are not native English speakers, English is the project's working language. Describe your fluency level in written English.

English is my native language.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

English.

3.3) Are you good at interacting with other players? Our developer community is friendly, but the player community can be a bit rough.

I have played several MMORPGs and other online games, and I'm very familiar and comfortable with interacting with other players online.

3.4) Do you give constructive advice?

I work as a tutor in the computer science department at my school, so I feel that I am fairly good at giving advice without giving offense.

3.5) Do you receive advice well?

Having played a few MMORPGs, Starcraft II, and programmed in a team setting, I am capable of taking advice, even if it is highly critical, in stride.

3.6) Are you good at sorting useful criticisms from useless ones?

Yes.

3.7) How autonomous are you when developing? Would you rather discuss intensively changes and not start coding until you know what you want to do or would you rather code a proof of concept to "see how it turn out", taking the risk of having it thrown away if it doesn't match what the project wants?

I prefer to start coding and test things myself to see if the behavior created is desirable. I believe planning is necessary, but that code cannot be truly evaluated until it is realized.

4) Project

4.1) Did you select a project from our list? If that is the case, what project did you select? What do you want to especially concentrate on?

I chose the "AI: Implement a 'total defense' strategy" project. I want to concentrate on having the AI naturally form battle lines as the result of extra heuristics added to the "enemy losses - aggression*own losses" formula.

4.2) If you have invented your own project, please describe the project and the scope.

4.3) Why did you choose this project?

I chose this project because I have just taken an AI course in school, and I would like to be able to apply what I have learned in a more complex setting.

4.4) Include an estimated timeline for your work on the project. Don't forget to mention special things like "I booked holidays between A and B" and "I got an exam at ABC and won't be doing much then".

May 3 - May 27:

Final exams on 5/3, 5/6, 5/8, and 5/9. Get experience playing the game. Become familiar with the parts of the code that I'll be working with. Improve proposal.

May 28 - June 16:

Speak with mentor about possible heuristics, how to apply them in the code, etc. Begin coding simple naive implementations of heuristics for testing.

June 30:

Find a metric by which to measure the performance of the naive implementations against each other.

July 15:

Have more refined versions of the heuristics for testing.

June 30:

Have most of project done for intensive testing and debugging.

August 16:

Have project finished and as bug free as possible.

4.5) Include as much technical detail about your implementation as you can.

Will include when I have a chance to interact with the game and code more.

4.6) What do you expect to gain from this project?

I expect to gain experience working on a real world project with a large amount of code involved. I also want to gain experience working with other people's code, as well as working on open source projects.

4.7) What would make you stay in the Wesnoth community after the conclusion of SOC?

I will stay with the project if I find the work enjoyable. I love gaming and creating games, and I would very much enjoy continuing to fine tune the AI for Wesnoth.

5) Practical considerations

5.1) Are you familiar with any of the following tools or languages?

• Git (used for all commits) Yes.
• C++ (language used for all the normal source code) Yes.
• STL, Boost, Sdl (C++ libraries used by Wesnoth) Yes to the STL, not the other two.
• Python (optional, mainly used for tools) Yes.
• build environments (eg cmake/scons) I have used makefiles.
• WML (the wesnoth specific scenario language) No.
• Lua (used in combination with WML to create scenarios) No.

5.2) Which tools do you normally use for development? Why do you use them?

For development I usually use Vim and Git, and compile in a terminal on Linux Mint. I prefer to use Vim because it allows me to work on any language on any operating system without having to change my development environment. I prefer compiling on the command line so that I know exactly what's going on when I compile/run my projects.

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in? Java, C++, C, Python.

5.4) Would you mind talking with your mentor on telephone / internet phone? We would like to have a backup way for communications for the case that somehow emails and IRC do fail. If you are willing to do so, please do list a phone number (including international code) so that we are able to contact you. You should probably *only* add this number in the application for you submit to google since the info in the wiki is available in public. We will *not* make any use of your number unless some case of "there is no way to contact you" does arise!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.