CSE1370/2370 Advanced First/Second-year Projects

Original Project Allocation

Final Project Allocation

Proposed projects

The following projects have been suggested by staff members.

TARGET (supervisor: Ann Nicholson)

The Age has a word game called "TARGET" where there is a 3 by 3 grid, each containing a letter. The game is to make as many words of 4 letters and longer as possible. Each letter may be used once per word. Each word must contain the centre letter and there must be at least one nine-letter word. No plurals ending in 's'; no foreign words; no proper names. This project has two possible components: (1) writing an interface to allow people to play this on-line; and/or (2) accessing an on-line dictionary to solve the game.

Go playing program (no supervisor yet)

Go is a game with simple rules. However, a computer program has yet to be written that can beat good human Go players. Write a Python program that can play Go. A Python module will be provided for representing a Go board, making moves, removing captured stones, and playing against a human opponent. Your task is to write a program that decides which moves the computer should make. At the end of semester the various programs developed will be played against each other to find the champion Go playing program.

Crossword Generator (supervisor: Reza Rafeh)

Creating a crossword for magazines and newspapers is a time-consuming task. This project involves creating a software to solve this problem. A collection of some questions(clues) and answers would be given to the software via a database . Then it would ask some extra information, for example number of all squares and number of blank squares. Then by using some portion of existing information in the database it would generate a crossword and demonstrate it graphically with relevant clues. This software should have the ability of interacting with the user to change some situations in the board for example replacing a question with another one or changing contents of some squares manually.

Computer controlled etchasketch (supervisors: Lloyd Allison and Nathan Hurst)

Build a simple mechanism to draw images onto an etch-a-sketch board using the computer. We will provide the etch-a-sketch and other funding, you provide the programming and assembly.

Inkscape (supervisor: Nathan Hurst)

This is an existing piece of software (> 180,000 lines of code) along the lines of Coraldraw. Google is currently funding people work on this. This project would involve adding a particular piece of functionality to the software.

Data import facilities for Weka (supervisor: Geoff Webb)

Weka (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/) is a data mining software suite written in Java. This project is to create data import facilities to broaden the types of data format to which the system can be applied. Weka's existing data import facilities utilise a Weka specific data format, requiring users to format their data before it can be processed. This project will involve creating a new data import facility that will import data saved in the widely used C4.5 format. Depending upon progress this may be extended to encompass other formats such as providing an ODBC database interface. You must already know Java, and it'd help if you know SQL.

This project will

• produce software of practical value to the large Weka user community
• provide experience creating robust, non-trivial, production standard software
• provide an opportunity to work with an active data mining research group

Generalised font handling in xfig/transfig (supervisor: Carlo Kopp)

Xfig is a widely used GPL drawing package (www.xfig.org). It currently has the limitation of severely restricted font handling, and restricted foreign language support. The aim of this project would be to introduce support for arbitrary font types and languages.

Nimrod (supervisor: Colin Enticott)

Over the past 10 years researchers at Monash and DSTC have produced a novel distributed computing application called Nimrod (See http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/nimrod). Nimrod is controlled by a Web based portal, and this allows users to run experiments from standard web browsers. Recent additions to Nimrod require extensions to be added to the Portal. This project involves designing and integrating interfaces for the new features. The applicant should be proficient in C++ and have a knowledge and/or interest in Web programming.

Knight's Tour (supervisor: none yet)

The Knight's Tours is a problem about finding whether it is possible for a Knight to visit every square on a 8x8 chess board only once. One of our academics staff members has been discussing this problem with a group of Primary School Children, and in this project we would like a program to be developed that would enable students to investigate this problem. Some of the features that this program could have are:

• To let a student decide where to move the Knight next.
• The ability to show which squares they have visited, and to keep track of the order that they were visited.
• To determine at various stages whether or not it is possible to find a solution, and if not which moves should be discarded.
• To enable students to investigate the tour on different size boards, and boards on different shapes, eg. a cylinder, a torus, or a Klein bottle.