final project

Information about the final project for the class.

For the final project of this class we will be building an AI to play the popular TV Game show Wheel of Fortune. We will be working off of the Can I Buy an AI repository. Please FORK this repo and do all of your work in your own GitHub repo. You will be graded based off of your repository.

If you are not familiar with Wheel of Fortune, it’s a TV Game Show that has been on the air for decades. For our canonical example in this class, we will use Pat Sajak’s last episode who hosted the show for more than 4 decades. You should be able to see some of the topics that we are covering in this class such as:

  • Information Theory
  • Entropy
  • Conditional Probabilities
  • Expected Outcomes
  • Game Theory
  • Nuance of language
  • Expected Probabilities

Potential topics for your project:

  • Deciding whether or not to spin the wheel
  • Should you buy a vowel
  • When do you guess for a toss up?
  • Winning vs maximizing money
  • Generative speech (Making jokes with the hosts)
  • Modeling other players’ behaviors
  • How would you play in other countries? (it exists)
  • What would other versions of this game look like? (Could you make an image based game instead?)

My goal for us is to combine all of the projects and write a big academic paper at the end of the semester on this game including anyone who contributes to be a co-author. Like I’ve repeated throughout this course, you can use AI for all aspects of the project. I wrote most of the initial code myself, but since then, I’ve been playing around with OpenHands to add features, test cases, etc. As always, just document when and where you use it.

DUE September 18th

Please write a 1 page page project proposal for what you would like to work on for Wheel of Fortune. The goal is for everyone to have different projects that we can work together to combine. Reminder, AI tools can be used for any assignment (just give me your prompt and what system you used). Please email me if you have questions about project ideas. I would STRONGLY recommend watching at least one game of WoF this week to help you prepare for the final project.

Please have this ready BEFORE class on 9/18. You can simply email me your one-pager.

DUE October 2nd

Please come to class prepared to present for 5 minutes on what your project will be for the semester. You can make slides if you want, or simply talk about the issue that you created in the github repository. Things that you will probably want to cover in your talk:

  • Overview of your project (what the feature is)
  • Expected outcome
  • What you will need (data, human labels, previous games, etc.)
  • Much more (that is relevant to your project)

Also, please come prepared to give feedback to your classmates. This provides more info than you could possible realize. If the class was graded, this would be weighted equally to your actual presentation.