At last! I finally get to write on my blog. I have been struggling to cope with the never-ending stream of course work, projects and exams. Alhamdulilah I think I have some time for a pretty quick post.
I finally turned in the artificial intelligence project, probably the most challenging projects of the semester. First, it had to be implemented in Python – a language I didn’t know too well. The project involved writing a parser to read PDDL files, creating some representation of the parsed problems, and then plugging the models into the existing infrastructure so that search could be carried out for plans. Well, I started and thought it wasn’t going to be too tough but ultimately spent hours upon hours coding, debugging, testing, validating and as usual, tearing at my hair in frustration at times :D.
At last, I finally got a working model, got more insight into AI and learnt a thing or two more about Python : I particularly love the interactive shell, it was easy to run my buggy programs in interactive mode and then hack them until the bugs ‘submitted’ and vanished! Victory is sweet!! I don’t know any other language that gives me this flexibility. Ahh, there were the usual problems of memory leaks, computation time, generators, memoization and stuff like that; some neat tricks were involved too. Looking back, I can say it was fun and I really enjoyed it. :D
Artificial intelligence is cool; have been learning about search, planning and now Bayesian Networks – you hear talk of constraint satisfaction problems, D-separation, Bayes’ theorem and stuff like that. I also take courses in Multi-Agent Systems and Data mining too and I have bagged some hours using Octave which is a ‘calculator’ according to my colleague.
Aside, I get to work on an Android-Django project whenever I have few minutes to spare – not too often but I play a supporting role to my teammate who is more involved in coding. Insha Allah, I’ll be doing more work after my finals… for now.. aarghh… I have a project in data mining due soon… more information after I turn it in insha Allah.
Lastly, you should check out Stanford online teaching classes… they are pretty great stuff!!!
Related articles
- Stanford’s Free Online Education Experiment (bigthink.com)
CodeKraft 
Cool Stuff! Its obvious you’re acquiring a whole lot of knowledge.
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Boss! I do hope so :D; bet you are on top of exciting stuff at Terragon too.
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Hi..nice to hear u are making cool progress..wanted to share with you some stuffs too…wishing you the best.if u have the time, u can learn flex for ur GUI and use Python for your backend..although it is not free sha(I am sure u know what I mean)..wishing you the very best. Would really love to talk with u when u are free.
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