Sample Research Plan

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Background: Many different techniques have been used in Artificial Intelligence research. Two of the most popular are evolutionary programming and neural networks. Both of these techniques have been well developed in the forty years since they were first proposed. In 1999, Dr. Fogel of the University of Southern California combined these two techniques in a way that he called: "Evolutionary Neural Networks". He demonstrated the power of this technique in developing a program that learned to play checkers without any expert knowledge. In 2005, Dr. White at Yuan Ze University in Taiwan successfully applied the technique to the game of Othello [1]. I believe that this technique has great potential in the areas of bio-infomatics and decision making in telemedicine. Thus I am hoping to study under Dr. White in this area. In particular, in the first year I hope to:

Generalize the code used in playing Othello
Investigate the average lifetime of an individual network in order to better understand how these networks evolve.

In the second year I would like to try to

combine evolution of the lookahead function with evolution of the evaluation function in the game of Othello.
attempt to apply the code to Chinese Chess, Japanese Go or another real world problem requiring pattern recognition.

In summary, in the first year I plan to spend 75% of my time on course work and 25% of the time becoming familiar with and extending Dr. White's existing ENN framework. In the second year I hope to work on 100% on the application of the technique to other problems.

[1] Chong, S.Y., Tan, M.K., White, J.D., Observing the Evolution of Neural Networks Learning to Play the Game of Othello, Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on, 9(3), 240-251 (June, 2005)