This week, our team has been working hard on our System Level Design Review (SLDR) report. As we mentioned in a previous post, the SLDR is like our PDR but aims to be as specific as possible in describing our project design. For our project, this involves coming up with a design for our AI model that will improve upon existing models, as well as a plan to thoroughly test it to make sure we hit our specifications.

We mentioned that we have access to bigger hardware with HiPerGator, a supercomputer at the University of Florida. To take advantage of this hardware, we plan on utilizing a form of ensemble learning to help our AI make decisions. Ensemble learning is like combining multiple AI models into one. Each base AI model can focus on a particular strategy (such as building roads or buying development cards), and we can add a decision algorithm to decide which strategy works best for the next move. This has the benefit of ensuring that our overall AI model doesn’t get “locked in” to a sub-optimal strategy.

Earlier this week, we gave our SLDR presentations to our peers. Although things went well overall, our peers have helped us learn better ways to present our tables. We’ve also taken some time to reflect on the organization of the presentation, and we hope to improve upon it by December 3rd when we give our real SLDR presentation to our sponsor. Our presentation will be given here at the University of Florida, so we won’t be traveling again for the rest of the semester, unfortunately. However, there will be other opportunities in the next semester!

There will not be a blog post next week as we are taking a break for Thanksgiving. After next week, there will be one final blog post for the Fall semester where we will share details about our SLDR presentation to our sponsor, discuss our plans for the break, and discuss our plans for the next semester. See you then!