Hello, we are the 2011 Nexus interns for Dr. Ceberio from Da Vinci. This summer is special in that it has two projects to it. First is an app for Droid phones that compares two DNA sequences and displays those that match together and the second is an AI in python using Minimax that plays connect four on a 3D board.
First, let’s talk about the app since we did that first. We used the Google’s app inventor to create the app first doing tutorials then moving on to the task at hand. The application has two text boxes that you put your string of DNA into, then it tells you if they are the same or not and lines up the two strings showing lines between the ones that match up and blanks where they don’t match up. The lines used to not match up properly due to the characters being different sizes but we solved that by putting several spaces between the characters when they are displayed.
Our second project was the 3D Connect Four AI that is designed to play the game and win against another AI made by the community college students. The game itself was made by Christian Del Hoyo and we added the intelligence agent. Our initial approach was to use Minimax, which is an AI that would follow a tree of decisions, branching out into different actions depending on what the player did. Unfortunately, a Minimax program was beyond our abilities so we settled for a large list of if statements that changed based on what the opponent played and random variable that selected the list of ifs that should be used.
