This week, our team visited CAE at their Orlando, Florida office to give our presentation for our Preliminary Design Review (PDR)! Our PDR covers our initial research, requirements, specifications, design, and project plan. Its purpose is to explain to our sponsor what we will do and how we plan to do it. With their approval, we can start focusing on implementing the AI model and simulation for our project.

We had originally planned to visit their facility in Tampa, but due to unforeseen circumstances, we had to see them in Orlando instead. We’ll hopefully get another chance later this year.

In other news, our team has managed to run our simulation on HiPerGator! Using a few basic resources, a single game of Catan takes about 5 seconds to run. That’s about 5,000 games in 8 hours! We’re hoping that by further increasing our resource usage and allowing games to run in parallel, we can increase this amount even more.

Our next plan is to analyze and modify the current simulation of Catan to better fit the design requirements for our project. We also plan to research different algorithms and reward strategies for our AI model. That’s all for now!