Week 6 Summer 2014 (6/24/2014)
We are in the dog days of Summer (past Summer Solstice on June 21st). Despite the heat 9actually it is not that hot), sudents are working hard and the projects are coming along. I need to get in touch with mentors to get more information about the progress of each project (I am still bewildered by the large number of students - my own fault!)
This week we had six talks:
1) Kit Hammer and Noelle Todd - (Pantry Client) Client DB http://rcos.rpi.edu/
2) Huiye Liu, Xitu Chen, Eunkyoung Lee, Peiyang Ding, Yiding Zhang - ShengGuanTu http://rcos.
3)-Maia Marchetti - Milkyway@home Expansion http:
4) Nicholas Pitt - OpenLab http://rcos.rpi.edu/
5) Joe Allen and Joe Eduardo - Jojo http://rcos.rpi.edu/
6) Ezra Dowd and Tahsin Loqman - RPI Walk http://rcos.rpi.edu/
Kit and Noelle are working on a Food pantry database for a local food shelter. Their software is wanted by at least one client. Both Kit and Noelle know about the customer's needs. Noelle is working on the backend using SQL and PostgressSql and Kit is working on the front end. They have done a preliminary design and implemented portions of it. Since the client has an old PC, the team is designing a sosftware system that can run on any machine. They have also posted their slides. here is a link to it. http://goo.gl/wyreG2 Hope oters follow their footsteps and share their presentations.
Huiye, Xitu, Eunkyoung, Peiyang and Yiding are working on an ancient Chinese game . Here is a techincal paper http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132278 Acccording to the author of this paper, "It can be argued that board games reflect the society in which they are conceived. Thus Monopoly reflects the entrepreneurial spirit of a capitalist society, while the Chinese game of Shengguan tu or "Promoting Officials" reflects the obstacles confronting officials throughout their careers.' On the scaled-down reality of a Monopoly board, players can display their entrepreneurial talents by acquiring desirable properties. By increasing the number of buildings they construct on these plots, owners charge ever higher rents until the other players run out of funds. By contrast, success in Shengguan tu is measured not only by the amount of funds that a player accumulates on his way to high office, but also by the prestige that the office confers on the holder."
To a novice's eye (that is me), it looked like a snakes and ladder game - but a lot more complicated. This game is also based on Ancient Chinese History and a strateg based game. It is a multiplayer game. They are developing this game in unity. There were a number of suggestions. One of them is to scale down theor game so that tye can build a prototype before the end of the summer. The group has done a number of sceneries involved in the game.
Maia talked about Milkyway@Home Expansion. This is part of the Milkyway@Home project. She has modified a lua file so that it will simulate several dwarf galaxies at once. She showed a video of this phenomenon having two dwarf galaxies. She has been working on the server code using an alpha project sets up on the milky way@home server.
Nick has been working on an Open Lab Project - open source version of LabVIEW - of course not the full version - but with only a few features and a few innovations. H ehas serial input device working from both input and output side. He has written a lot of code using C sharp. There were a number of suggestion from different students about which packages Nick could use to further improve/develop his program.
Joe and Joe talked about their online gambling/gaming platform for competitive players. The games they are considering are deterministic games. It is based purely on strategy and not on luck. It is also a perfect information game (I think). They are building a siple game of a shooter - The amount ammunition one gets is based on the amount he invests. In future the team wants other people to develop games for their platform. There were a large number of questions and suggestions from the audience.
Finally Ezra and Tahsin talked about their android application RPI Walk. Tahsin is doing the front end of user interface and Ezra is working on the back end. They are using Open Street Map for their map of buildings and the open source route finder to find routes. Their route finder and the time it takes part of their program is done. They are working on the notificaion of wen to leave the building so as to arrive in a particular building (called notifier) and multiple routes. They are making great progress and they are making weekly blog posts too.
As usual I learnt a lot by attending these talks. Hope many of these projects succeed and make the students and RPI and RCOS proud!
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