Question

I wanted to ask Stack Overflow users for a nice idea for a project that could entertain a fellow student programmer during a semester. Computer vision might look interesting, although I couldn’t say if a project on that field is something that could be achievable in 4 months. What do you think?

Answer 1

There is a story that, during the early days of AI research when significant progress was being made on ‘hard’ logic problems via mechanical theorem provers, a professor assigned one of his graduate students the ‘easy’ problem of solving how vision provided meaningful input to the brain. Obviously, things turned out to be far more difficult than the professor anticipated. So, no, not vision in the general sense.

If you are just starting in AI, there are a couple of directions. The classic AI problems – logic puzzles – are solved with a mechanical theorem prover (usually written in Lisp – see here for the classic text on solving logical puzzles). If you don’t want to create your own, you can pick up a copy of Prolog (it is essentially the same thing).

You can also go with pattern recognition problems although you’ll want to keep the initial problems pretty simple to avoid getting swamped in detail. My dissertation involved the use of stochastic proccesses for letter recognition in free-floating space so I’m kind of partial to this approach (don’t start with stochastic processes though, unless you really like math). Right next door is the subfield of neural networks. This is popular because you almost can’t learn NN without building some interesting projects. Across this entire domain (pattern processing), the cool thing is that you can solve real problems rather than toy puzzles.

A lot of people like Natural Language Processing as it is easy to get started but almost infinite in complexity. One very definable problem is to build an NLP program for processing language in a specific domain (discussing a chess game, for example). This makes it easy to see progress while still being complex enough to fill a semester.

Hope that gives you some ideas!