Dusoku

So first of all a dump of all the information that was written on the board.

Project description:

• collect, prioritize, implement human strategies for making progress in sudoku puzzle
• identifying and abstracting re-usable search patterns(exploiting symmetry of rows and columns for example)
• rate complexity of strategies, hence of problems which require them(evaluate against problem sample)
• figure out what makes a good explanation of a move, hint towards a move or a criticism of a move
• reflect on what is sudoku specific and what transfers (what strategies could be used for kakuro for example)
• make it fun (evaluation criteria)

Objectives:

• an analysis of human strategies for solving sudoku
• a presentation of explanation for progress in sudoku
• development of library components separating strategy-specific aspects, sudoku specific aspects, general constraint problem kit
• delivery as web-based tutor (probably in Java)
• evaluation(with respect to graded problem sample, user experience

Initial Plan:

• grab a graded problem sample e.g. from www.websudoku.com
• implement a basic model of board and solver
• develop strategy framework and add basic explanation and guessing strategies
• add more sophisticated strategies refactoring library kit
• evaluate against sample
• build basic web app
• develop graphical representation of explanation, hints, criticisms
• user experience evaluation
• finish report

Okay so that's what was written down on the board. Now for me to emphasise some things.

First of all this system is for Humans! so human strategies must be employed. No silly brute forcing of the problem. It's just not possible for humans to work through every iteration of a sudoku puzzle.

What is progress? Progress may not mean filling in a number, but rather eliminating certain numbers from certain squares thereby allowing you to continue and find a space where a number will fit.

Translating strategies into code will be difficult.

I need to get large library of sudoku puzzles that are graded and keep a track of them. Then use them as a basis for grading them using my own program. (will have some way of seeing what strategies were needed to solve the problem and therefore how difficult it is)

So lets leave this here for now, I'll post more when I am not on my way to class.

E-Commerce

So this class it turns out is actually my favourite class of the year so far. Most people think I am mad, but I like the idea of getting to know how to make money from the internet. Obviously it would be awesome to be self employed. I think I could trade making money on the internet for one of my other goals of living in the wilderness and feeding off of the land.

E-Commerce Technologies - Tuesday 28th September 2010

Most of this class was discussing our project work specifically for this class. I am in a group with two others on my course and we have a deadline on Monday already. Also a lot of this class is availiable online in the form of chapters of a book. I don't know if I could make too many notes on this class but I'll try and raise points that the lecturer made.

This class is about how to make money from the internet. Even without selling anything. Turns out the first lecture had no real information so I'll just leave this blank and type up the next one later this evening.

Catch up Session

So I haven't been her in a while. I guess it's just me being lazy but I have beeen assigned my project for the year. The project I was assigne was a Sudoku Explainer. It is a program that is supposed to help people to learn how to play sudoku rather than to just complete these games via a brute force search. A link to the prject information page shall now be provided, http://local.cis.strath.ac.uk/teaching/ug/cs4projects/.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

Multimedia Information Access - Wednesday 29th September

Boolean Retrieval:

So this was a very easy and simple lecture. It talked about how to deal with searches that were more than one word. A popular way of doing this is to use boolean logic to determine which is best to search for or which terms to ignore.

We watched a video on youtube about a simple boolean search used in some sort of University database. This introduced the concept of boolean operators (which I already know a lot about ;). An extra boolean term was added (purely in terms of searching) and this was NEAR. NEAR basically means taht you want to search for these two words and you want them to be near each other in the text.

Using a Venn diagram the lecturer showed us how these boolean terms can work, however this was not very effective for searches of more than 4 terms as it became almost impossible to include every term in one diagram. Next in an example from the 2009 exam it was shown that when searching for several different terms it was best to search for the term with the fewest reults as this would allow you to quickly get some initial results whilst the rest of the search was being carried out.

Next we went on to cover Conjunctive Normal Form and Disjunctive Normal Form. To put it simply CNF is a Product of Sums term and DNF is a sum of Products term. To convert between these two forms we can use DeMorgan's Law (i.e. break the line change the sign) and then usual distributive laws to work out the new terms. Also, NOT is not allowed to be applied to a group. It must instead only be applied to single terms.

That may not be too clear but it was nearly 2 weeks ago and I have kind of forgotten most of what the guy said.