MSC: Torcs Suprisingly Runs on Vista - Finally

Tried running the experiment of Sigmoidal ANN on PC2's native OS, Vista, and surprisingly returned no error. Will duplicate it and run the experiment on PC3 and PC5, which also runs Vista.

MSC: Gen2 ANN Experiment

Today start the experiment with the 2nd generation sigmoidal ANNs.

MSC: Submitted to HIS 2011

Dr J finally replied my email. What a relief!
So I continued on and submitted my 1st paper to HIS 2011 top cnference.

Thank You Jesus. Amen.

MSC: Paper ready for submission

Finish adding in the path driven and SNN spike train. Also revised ES to EP.
Revised some format to reflect the IEEE format for HIS2011


I finished revising it to how Dr J suggested, and sent him another email with the doc for a final review. Then, the paper will be sent to HIS2011.
Should be able to submit soon, before Sept 20.

EDIT: Registered with easychair, to submit paper to HIS2011 in Malacca

MSC: Paper Revised by Dr J

Dr J replied my email with an attached and revised document of the paper. He took out a few paragraphs and said to keep them for next paper.

Some things Dr J suggested include adding a chart of the SNN spike train, and revise ES to EP.

MSC: The evolved controllers beat me

there were some round, the evolved controller  had almost took over the leading car, but bangged on it and both the cars skidded, but the evolved controller could not recover from the crash and stayed there.

lap7: > 10sec behind

the controllers evolved on track 1 usually started slow, most likely due to the unoptimized automatic transmission, but would later overtake its oponents after one or two laps.

controllers evolved on track 2 were able to generalize on track 1, but could only complete one fifth of track 3.

controllers evolved on track 3 were able to generalize on both track 1 and 2.

controllers evolved on track 1 were not able to generalize on both track 2 and 3.



i lost to the evolved controller on both track 1 and 2, butnot track 3 despite the difficulty controlling the car.


the gear change played a very big impact

MSC: Suggested improvements and new discovery

Received a reply from Dr J yesterday.
Listed below are the suggested improvements and its state:

1. Use round figures to label the x-axis of your graphs (done)
2. Show more in-game screenshots of you SNN-driven car – although it is not of much scientific value here but nice pictures always gets attention
3. Think of plotting the path driven by the best evolved SNNs as they move across the track over the racing period
4. Avoid saying that your evolved controllers were so easily beaten by human and some of the included controllers.
5. Also, your explanation that humans cheat by flooring the accelerator is not convincing since if it is allowed in the game, then it is not cheating. What I meant by cheating is when the game AI controllers break rules such as achieving top speed immediately (as opposed to flooring the accelerator but gradual build-up of speed) or in the case of RTS, being able to see through fog-of-war, then that’s cheating. So I recommend that you amend the way you are currently explaining this point.
6. Please add in a detailed description of your fitness function including a mathematical formula for it. (done)

Discovered something new. In track 1, the controller is able to start by flooring the gas pedal, but it is still slower than the other car because of the gear change strategy. The evolved controller increased gear earlier than the static controller, hence picked up speed slower than it.

Drew track path, but...

Notice that
championship2011server uses a car1-trb1 and the others bot using the same car are:

• tita 3
• berniw 3
• olethros 3
• lliaw 3
• inferno 3
• bt 3

MSC: Paper 1 Finally Done

I'm finally done with paper 1! 4am in the morning, August 29, 2011. 2 days before the deadline of the IEEE SCOReD 2011 (9th SCOReD).

Sent email to Dr J to schedule meeting, attached with the document file of the paper.

MSC: Discussions are almost done

Given the fact that track 3 is much more difficult to race in, the fitness scores are considered quite high as compared to the ratio between this track and the other 2 tracks.

Low average speed, low speed = smaller distance raced,

An interesting observation to note, apart from spectating it drive on the track, is...

So.. quite a fruitful day today. but if I made use of the whole day, I could have done more. but it's ok. I'll try to do much more tomorrow.

Aiming to get it done by end of this week, which is on the August 27, latest by August 28.

MSC: Discussions on the way

Inserted all charts into paper, and also a table of the best lap times.

MSC: PC3 keeps crashing, another day to completely compile all results

Run on PC2 is done, but run on PC3 was interrupted by a PC crash at 4am, so I continued it at 10.30pm.
Transferred the results of a run from home PC to PC1, to be compiled together with the rest.

Archived a collection of 3 runs on track 1, the latest, "3_snn_1.csv" is guaranteed to run with the latest settings: RS parameters, best lap time, but there's 2 others, which i'm not quite sure. So I'm sending them home to test run it on home PC.

I compiled the results of the 2 latest completed runs, the one from home, and PC2, into "Track1.xlsx".

As of now, PC1 has completed around 650 generations. Will complete tomorrow.

Found out yesterday from the email Dr J sent us that there's gonna be an international conference in Bangkok. Submission due date is on September 10, 2011.

MSC: Fitness of controller on track 1 tells of sophisticated driving skills

These are just some thoughts and/or style of writing that unnecessarily be in the paper.

After examining the scores and the controller driving in real-time, we can tell that the controller evolved driving strategies. Although track 1 has only four turning corners, does not mean that the fitness of the controller will easily be that high, because there is high possibility that a less sophisticated driving technique would make the controller slow down while turning the corner.

MSC: My laptop is a snail

The run on laptop is running too slow. It's been a day already and it hasn't even completed 100 generations. Since the run on PC1 was done yesterday, I'm transferring the run on the laptop to continue on PC1.

The run on PC3 on the other hand has stopped, cos the computer crashed, around 2pm, so I continued it around 5pm. Run on PC2 is fine. and finishing today.

UPDATE: So I continued the run from my laptop on PC1, but I discovered that the results don't match, in fact, the results varies so much. One reason 1 observed, is because the settings I had on my laptop for the race is 1 lap! but how come?! Oh I remember, I duplicated the copy I had in my HDD, which probably has a setting of only 1 lap. Hence the flawed results. Hence I had taken to start a new run on PC1. What a waste of time.

Jessica's birthday 2011

Does it make sense to take the best controller of all runs: The best controller of all 10 runs, of the best controller of all 10 controllers of 1000 generations..?

Run on PC1 is done. inserted the results into the spreadsheet.
Arranged the best lap times for tracks 2 and 3.
Included chart of track 2 and 3 into doc file.
Going home to continue.

Produce analysis of results at home!

Today's Jessica's birthday!!

MSC: Prepared laptop for demonstration

Reach school at 7pm, did not accomplish any progress in writeup yet again, but I managed to install VS2010 on laptop, copied the code and simulator over, and started a run on track 1 on it.

PC3 restarted, so continued from where it left off.

Not sure when I edited the source again, but I edited it since last Thursday Aug 11 and ought to note it down just in case I haven't wrote it down yet.
Right now, the client records the best lap time of the controller, the neuron parameter values are set to reflect Regular Spiking (0.02, 0.2, -65, 8).

So.. Progress...
I basically completed the runs on track 2 and 3 for paper 1. For track 1:

• 5 completed runs
• 4 in progress (home, PC1, PC2, PC3), and 1 started today on laptop.
• So all together == 10.

Next task would be to:

• Organize data in excel and produce charts to be inserted into paper.
• Show Dr J the controller, and explain the codes.
• Must work on write up.

Was it a good day?

Did almost nothing related to my studies, except starting 3 more runs in lab for track 1. Other than that, I did not accomplish any progress in my write up. I was suppose to prepare my laptop to show Dr J the simulator and code explanation, but failed to do it, or forgot about it, in a sense.

I ended up downloading a remote access program called "team viewer." At least it's free for non-commercial use.

P.S. I almost forgot to key in data for my accounts. Thank God I remembered. I also ought to catch up with my bible reading!

MSC: table to display best lap time

Table structure to display the best lap times of each run for all 3 tracks.

Run	Track 1	Track 2	Track 3
1	...s	...s	...s
2	...s	...s	...s
3	...s	...s	...s
4	...s	...s	...s
5	...s	...s	...s
6	...s	...s	...s
7	...s	...s	...s
8	...s	...s	...s
9	...s	...s	...s
10	...s	...s	...s
	mean +/- sd	mean +/- sd	mean +/- sd

MSC: Algorithm for best lap time

if(cs.getLastLapTime() > 0.0)
{
    if(bestLapTime == 0.0)
        bestLapTime = cs.getLastLapTime();
    else if(cs.getLastLapTime() < bestLapTime)
        bestLapTime = cs.getLastLapTime();
}

Wasted 4 days running redundant experiments

Discovered that I had wasted 4 days running 2 experimental runs on track 2!! Gosh. So I initiated another run, but this time mad sure it started in generation 0 and the track is track 1.

Will go to school today to start more runs on track 1 in lab. Now, I need some sleep!

taking a time off

I started slacking on Thursday after meeting Dr J, ad finding out that the submission deadline for a conference in UPM is extended to Aug 31. My laptop is still at school and I need to go and get it.