I went from only having experience in pseudocode to getting an A+ and winning a programming contest in my Introduction to Computer Science class, so the next semester I decided to kick it up a notch and do the honors version of the sebsequent class. This turned out to be great since we did some very interesting stuff including a few games like mine sweeper and a simple web style game and it was incredibly rewarding.
The final project took up the last 6 weeks of class and introduced things that we would use in the business world like Subversion, internet communication, and design specifications. The first 4 weeks was completely done according to design specs that would be given to us, and the final 2 weeks were for a few hard additions to the project and adding anything that we wanted for the end of semester competition.
The game itself is fairly simple: you have a robot that must navigate a board in order to pick up packages and then deliver them elsewhere, all of this must be done via an AI with no human intervention. In addition to this, your robot must communicate with a server, which maintains the game state, and tell the server what it is going to during it's turn.
Though the whole thing was fun, my baby in the project was creating a pathfinding algorithm using Dijkstra's algorithm, as opposed to the simple breadth first search that was assigned earlier in the project. While there was another two groups that used Djikstra, I managed to go a step further and added in the ability to see if doing nothing was the best possible move to make, which allowed our robot to dominate on boards that included conveyor belt tiles.
Overall it was a great project and I want to commend my partners Kevin and Anne for their awesome work and our professor Suzanne Menzel for being a great mentor.
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