It has been a wonderful year with IPPD! We’ve gone through a long journey to get here. We researched different board games to pick one suitable for our project. We visited CAE in Orlando to give our PDR presentation. We… Read More

This week, Team Tactica began its final preparations for our upcoming Final Design Review (FDR)! The Final Design Review is the biggest event for IPPD. We will be spending all day in the UF Reitz Union presenting our projects to… Read More

This week, Team Tactica finished recording the first draft of our project video! Since our project centers on Catan, we wanted to include clips of us playing the game. We wanted to have clips showing moves like trading and building… Read More

This week, our team gave our presentation for Prototype Inspection and Evaluation Day. We got the chance to show off our improved user interface, our different approaches to machine learning models, and some of our results. Our team recently developed… Read More

We’re back from spring break! This week, Team Tactica began work on preparing for the upcoming Prototype Inspection and Evaluation Day. Previously, IPPD held a Prototype Inspection Day (PID) in mid-November for the Fall semester. Back then, the focus was… Read More

This week, Team Tactica met to continue work on the project. With spring break coming up, our team has to be ready to take advantage of our extra time and train our models. Each of us has been working on… Read More

This week, our team continued to work on our GNN reinforcement learning model for Catan. During this, we also sought to improve Catanatron’s trading interfaces. Originally, Catanatron only allowed maritime trading, that is, trading at ports or with the resource… Read More

This week, our team gave our second Qualification Review Board (QRB) presentation! Unlike the first QRB presentation, this one focuses on our testing plan where we run our model against player bots of increasing difficulty to see how well it… Read More

This week, our team continued to work on building our AI agent. We considered the potential for newer methods of representing the game board. Training an AI to play a game requires some representation of the game’s state. For board… Read More

This week, Team Tactica met to discuss our upcoming testing plan for our project! Testing our reinforcement learning agent is a little tricky. We want our model to have a high “win rate”, but Catan is a multiplayer game, meaning… Read More

This week, our team met together in UF’s Nuclear Sciences Building to sit down and make sure that everyone on the team has a good understanding of our project’s code base. During this meeting, we went over our current project’s… Read More

This week our team gave our first Qualification Review Board (QRB) presentation! The QRB presentation is meant to provide an overview of our plans and our current progress, so we can receive feedback for improving our project. Among the things… Read More

This week, our team began work on training our first models! The simulation we’ve chosen to use is called Catanatron. It is an open-source Catan simulation for testing bot strategies. In Catanatron, we can build player classes using different strategies.… Read More

It’s a new year and a new semester, and Team Tactica is ready to get to work! Now that our plan is in place, we will spend this semester working directly on our project. Over the next sixteen weeks, we’ll… Read More