Week 14: SLDR and Semester Wrap-Up

This week, our team gave our System Level Design Review (SLDR) presentation! The event was an exciting experience for all of us as we gathered in the Reitz Union Rion Ballroom to network with the liaison engineers from other teams and learn more about life in the workplace.

Team Tactica at the Reitz Union giving the SLDR presentation.

The SLDR presentation is the final presentation of the semester, so we wanted to make sure we finished strong. We talked about how the game of Catan is played, previous research done on Catan, our requirements and specifications, our project architecture, and our testing plan. There were a few clarifying questions and mainly clarifying questions. Overall, the presentation was a success!

Han and Max in the Reitz Union Rion Ballroom talking with other students.
Han and Max speaking with other IPPD students at SLDR.

The event also gave us a chance to relax and celebrate. We learned a lot over the semester: how to create a list of specifications, concept generation, public speaking, and team management. After a long journey, we now have a plan for the spring semester starting in January.

IPPD can be struggling at times, but it’s a great experience as it emulates the engineering design process that professional engineers go through. Additionally, we get to work with real companies and expand our network.

Among the things we’ll be working on next are creating our ensemble model, fixing any remaining issues with the simulation, and creating a script to test our model according to our testing plan. We also have plans to explore other simulations of Catan and see if we can learn from them.

Some of our team members also plan on helping out with the project during the winter break.

Andres plans on reviewing reinforcement learning concepts and playing against the current simulation’s AI to see how they can be improved.

Brian plans on studying other simulations and building a small reinforcement learning model to try and learn more about building AI models.

Dr. Jorg Peters, Jason, and Brian talking at the Reitz Union Rion Ballroom.
Dr. Jorg Peters, Jason, and Brian at SLDR.

This will be the last blog post for a while. We hope you’ve found our project interesting! Things are only just getting started! See you next time!

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