Assignment
Write a program which changes its behavior over time depending on the accumulated information exchanged with its environment. The primary input to the program should be human-controlled. The input can be a mouse, keyboard, camera, tablet, or a more unique device. The output can be visual or sonic or a combination of both. The focus in on the behavior you invent and how it relates to changes depending on the input.
Concept
The idea was to create a system that can interpret human gestures and learn and predict newer gestures. The general basis behind the system comes from Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which deals with the human mind's ability to draw accurate conclusions on only a tiny amount of data.
The user would draw gestures, and the system would reduce them to normalized angles and magnitudes, which I hypothesized would be similar to how our eyes would interpret a gesture. Then as the user draws new gestures, the system compares the new gesture against its memory of stored gesture and tries to predict what is being drawn.
Results
The organization of the code was almost overwhelmingly complex for a week-and-a-half long project, and my inexperience with learning systems had my mind going in circles. The system does generally what I wanted it to do, but the comparision algorithm is very underdeveloped and it is a bit unpredictable. To make a really intelligent learning system, I believe there would need to be a more developed overarching process instead of simply relying on the one-to-one comparisons.