Thursday, November 19, 2009

Temporal Pattern Recognition

As an alternative to neural networks, I have found that a technique called linear predictive coding does a good job at temporal pattern recognition. I wrote a couple short scripts in MATLAB which do binary prediction and play rock paper scissors. The binary prediction seems to work better than the version I made using neural networks. I think that the RPS AI also works better than the version I made using hierarchical temporal memory, although I haven't interfaced the two programs together yet to test them.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

CTV

A friend let me know that there was a clip of me on CTV. It was on a story about upgrading Vancouver's networking system for the Olympics. I was completely unaware that I had been filmed.

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Genetics

Rock Paper Scissors

I have released a rock paper scissors (RPS) AI on my homepage. It was made using hierarchical temporal memory. RPS is a great domain to test temporal pattern recognition, so I am somewhat disappointed how poorly my AI does. Some people may be surprised that there is any strategy involved in RPS. After all, an AI which just outputs random moves will win 50% of the time. Humans are terrible at being random, so its not hard for an AI to win against people. When competing AI against AI, superior strategies can be determined based on their performance against a large number of opponents. This allows some AIs to get much better results than ones which just output random moves.

I have become really interested in hierarchical temporal memory since starting grad school. My supervisor Nando said that this might be a topic I can pursue for my thesis. I think there are some pretty major flaws with the implementation by Numenta. I implemented my own version using backpropagation neural networks. So far I have tested it in three applications (binary input prediction, handwritten digit recognition, and RPS). The results haven't been great. Next I plan on comparing it directly to NuPIC on their standard datasets. Hopefully my implementation does better! If so, this would be a great thesis topic.

Saturday, November 07, 2009

2009 Pacific Northwest Contest

Today was the ACM ICPC regional programming contest. Here is the final scoreboard:

UBC^ got first place.
Stanford got second and third place.
UVic got fourth place.
UBC+ got 10th place.
UBC* got 15th place.

There were 77 teams competing. I was on UBC*. In theory UBC* was supposed to do better than UBC+. They lucked out because one of their members knew a specific algorithm from a graph theory course which allowed them to solve a very difficult problem (which only two teams solved). Our team did really well on time, but we got completely stuck once we reached five problems. In fact, we were in first place when we got to five problems. There were two or three additional problems which were definitely solvable, but unfortunately we didn't finish them in time :(.

Friday, November 06, 2009

Nort

I have released another Java game called Nort. This is a two player game based on Tron.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Soku

Today I made a game called Soku using Java (you can play it here). It is a remake of a game I made in high school. I think it is the best of the three Java games I have made so far (the other two being Ping and Swarm). Ping is also a remake of a game I made in high school.