Last Modiﬁed: April 16, 2017

CS 175: Project in AI (in Minecraft): Spring 2017

Project Proposal

Sameer Singh

http://sameersingh.org/courses/aiproj/sp17/

For the proposal, you have to ﬁnalize your group members, propose an idea for your course project, describe

the evaluation plan, and set up project website with a page for this submission.

1 Setting a Repository and a Website

For the project that you will be working on this quarter, we expect you to maintain a Github repository for the

code, and an associated website. I have given a detailed step-by-step guide below, and although it looks like there

are a lot of steps involved, it shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes if you’re familiar with git .

1.1 Setting up the Repository

Here are a steps to create a new repository on Github:

If you don’t have a Github account, sign up for one for free, and ask all for your group members to sign up

for one as well. Read some tutorials on how

git

works

, and get comfortable in it; you will be using it to

maintain the website and the code for the project.

In order to create a repository that will store your project code and website, pick one of the group members

under which the repo will be created. For simplicity, I will assume the repo will be created under the Github

username USER .

That person should log in, go to the

on the top right, and click New repository. Select a short name of

your group/project, and name your repository that (let’s assume you called it

PROJECT

). Make sure the

owner is

USER

, make it public if you’re new to this, click Initialize with a README, and then click Create

repository. Congrats, your repository should now be created (with a url like

github.com/USER/PROJECT

and you can commit whatever you want!

In order to add your group members to the repository, go to the Settings tab, click Collaborators, and add all

of your group members using their Github IDs. They should be able to commit/edit ﬁles in the repo once

they accept the invitation (ask them to test it out).

Advanced Users:

If you’re familiar with Github, feel free to create the repo under

an organization if you like. You can also create a private repository if you pre-

fer, but add the course staff as collaborators (

sameersingh

MosheLichman

, and

wangzheallen ).

1.2 Setting up the Website

I will provide some ﬁles and the steps to get started in order to create a website for your project. Here, I will

assume your project repository is hosted at

github.com/USER/PROJECT

. The following steps can be followed by

the owner or any one of the group members (who have been added as “Collaborators” in the previous section).

Download the zip ﬁle from

https://github.com/sameersingh/gh-skeleton/releases/tag/cs175sp17

2. Unzip the ﬁle somewhere on your disk; you will see that insides docs/ , there are only 5 ﬁles, in 2 folders.

Create a

docs/

folder in your project repo, and commit the ﬁles from the above

docs/

folder into it, using

either the command-line (preferred) or uploading them one by one using the GUI.

Here are two: https://try.github.io/ and https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/

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CS 175: Project in AI (in Minecraft) Spring 2017

If successful, your repo online,

github.com/USER/PROJECT

should have a

docs/

folder in it, which should

have the same structure as:

https://github.com/sameersingh/gh-skeleton/tree/master/docs

. If you

have any questions, post it on Piazza along with your repo URL, so that we can help you with it.

Once the

docs/

folder is created and contains the same structure as

https://github.com/sameersingh/

gh-skeleton/, it is time to make the website public! The owner, USER in this case, should now log in and:

Go to Settings again, scroll down to the Github Pages section, and select the second option (master branch

/docs folder). If it is unavailable, you do not have a

docs/

folder in the root of your repo; ensure the ﬁle

structure is there, and return to this step.

2. Press Save, and it should say GitHub Pages source saved. at the top of the page.

Now open a new tab, and go to

USER.github.io/PROJECT

. There should be a website there, and should

look exactly like http://sameersingh.github.io/gh-skeleton/.

Again, if you have any questions, post on Piazza how far you got, where you got stuck, and a link to the repository.

Now that your website is up, it’s time to make it yours. Any one of the group members can do the following:

Edit

config.yml

and change the title from “PROJECT” to the name of the repository (do not make other

changes to this ﬁle unless you know what you’re doing). You can do these edits from Github website itself,

just navigate to the ﬁle and click the edit button (looks like a pencil icon). Commit and push your changes,

and in a few minutes, your website should change to reﬂect the new name on the front page and navigation

bar.

(optional) Edit

index.md

to put whatever you want. If you use the Github website to make these edits, you

can use Preview button to see what the front page will look like. Just do not remove or edit the ﬁrst four

lines (the stuff in between, and including, the

---

) unless you know what you are doing. Once you commit

and push your changes, you should see the website reﬂect it. The default text on this page has some basic

information about Markdown, and a link to a complete guide on how to format using Markdown.

Edit

team.md

and replace the placeholders with your teammates and their UCINetIDs (

NOT

the student

ID number!). Unless you are familiar with Markdown, you don’t need to add anything else. If you want

to make more edits, or make it look prettier, just look up guides on Markdown, and edit it as you see ﬁt.

For example, you can add more information if you like, such as photos, links to homepages, links to Github

proﬁle, etc. Commit and push your changes, and in a few minutes, the team page of your website should

have the new information.

Advanced Users:

If you’re familiar with Github Pages, you can completely ignore

my skeleton (it’s pretty ugly and basic after all), and do whatever you like. The only

constraints are (1) you have to use the

docs/

method of Github Pages, (2) that

there should be a dedicated page for the team and one for the proposal (and later,

for other project submissions), and (3) the links to these pages should be obvious

from the main page.

2 Contents of the Proposal

2.1 Creating a Proposal Page (15 points)

You will notice that there is a greyed out link to the proposal in the navigation bar, that gives an error if you click

on it. This will change once you create a

docs/proposal.md

ﬁle with the following header as the ﬁrst four lines:

1 ---

2 layout: default

3 title: Proposal

4 ---

The rest of the ﬁle should contain the rest of the proposal, using the Markdown format (headings start with

one for each section below, and regular text doesn’t need any formatting). Commit and push your new ﬁle, and the

link should be active in a few minutes. As long as you have a website and a proposal page, you’ll get these points.

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CS 175: Project in AI (in Minecraft) Spring 2017

2.2 Summary of the Project (30 points)

In a paragraph or so, mention the main idea behind your project. At the very least, you should have a sentence

that clearly explains the input/output semantics of your project, i.e. what information will it take as input, and

what will it produce. Mention any applications, if any, for your project.

2.3 AI/ML Algorithms (10 points)

In a single sentence, mention the AI and ML algorithm(s) you anticipate using for your project. It does not

have to be a detailed description of the algorithm, even the sub-area of the ﬁeld is sufﬁcient. Examples of this

include “planning with dynamic programming”, “reinforcement learning with neural function approximator”,

“deep learning for images”, “min-max tree search with pruning”, and so on.

2.4 Evaluation Plan (30 points)

As described in class, mention how you will evaluate the success of your project. In a paragraph, focus on the

quantitative evaluation: what are the metrics, what are the baselines, how much you expect your approach to

improve the metric by, what data will you evaluate on, etc. In another paragraph, describe what qualitative analysis

you will show to verify the project works, such as what are the sanity cases for the approach, how will you visualize

the internals of the algorithm to verify it works, what’s your moonshot case, i.e. it’ll be awesome and impressive if

you get there. Note that these are not promises, we’re not going to hold you to what you say here, but we want to

see if you are able to think about evaluation of your project in a critical manner.

2.5 Appointment with the Instructor (15 points)

One member of the group should take an appointment with the instructor in the week starting 4/23 (or 4/30, if

no slots are available). Select a time such that all members of the group can attend, unless one or more members

of your group can absolutely not make any of the available times. In the proposal page, mention the date and time

you have reserved the appointment for.

Use the following link to make your appointment: https://calendly.com/sameersingh/office-hours

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