[mlpack] mlpack Digest, Vol 13, Issue 27

[Andrew Wells]

Hi Ryan.  I'm happy to talk about my previous experience, I just wasn't 
sure whether you wanted to read about in my application or on the 
mailing list.  Here goes:

Robocode is an AI programming competition, where I have one of the top 
competitors (http://robowiki.net/wiki/Gilgalad). The robot uses the kNN 
algorithm for data analysis, which is done under strict time 
limitations.  To deal with this, I implemented a tree that is similar 
kD-tree, but with minimum bounding rectangles. (source code is in the 
Mallorn package here: 
https://sites.google.com/site/awusa94/robocode/aw.Gilgalad_1.99.7.jar). 
Because the trees are built dynamically, I unfortunately don't have 
experience with bulk-loading.  However, the tree is highly optimized, 
based on my own experiments and discussions from the robocode community. 
(I can provide a plethora of examples of these discussions if you want.  
For starters I have: 
http://robowiki.net/wiki/User_talk:Rednaxela/kD-Tree , 
http://robowiki.net/wiki/User:Duyn/kd-tree_Tutorial , and 
http://robowiki.net/wiki/User_talk:Skilgannon/KDTree). Of course, some 
of these optimizations are Java specific, but many are not. For example, 
traversing the tree without recursion gives a small speed-up by 
eliminating the stack overhead, and some of our experiments indicate 
that descending the tree with a "depth first" strategy and then checking 
the other branches in a "breadth first" order can give better results 
than the standard descent ascent approaches.

I hope that gives you a good idea of my experience with robocode.  I go 
into more detail in my application, but if you want more here, feel free 
to ask.


On 03/14/2014 12:00 PM, mlpack-request at cc.gatech.edu wrote:
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>     1. GSoC project idea (Andrew Wells)
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> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:00:13 -0400
> From: Andrew Wells <andrewmw94 at gmail.com>
> To: mlpack at cc.gatech.edu
> Subject: [mlpack] GSoC project idea
> Message-ID: <5323278D.7080609 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>       Hi all, I'm Andrew Wells, I am in the process of applying to work
> on mlpack for Google Summer of Code, and I wanted to introduce myself.
> I'm hoping to work on optimization of the tree traversal code in mlpack,
> as this seems to be the area where I have the most previous experience.
> I was wondering if you could give me some more information about this
> project.  Also, I think it would be helpful for me to first submit
> another tree, say an R*-tree, to the mlpack code base to familiarize
> myself with it.  Am I free to combine project proposals like that?
> Thanks for your time and I hope to work with you over the summer.
>
>
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> End of mlpack Digest, Vol 13, Issue 27
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