A new semester begins

This is going to be my last fall semester at Lafayette. My course load is pretty ok. I have

Artificial Intelligence
This class has about 5 pupils in it. Pfaffman is a fun teacher. He's planning on having us do paper instead of exams. My initial reading on AI has peaked my interest, plus I need to review my graph algorithms. I think its going to be a fun class. Whilst reading the "Arguing AI" book, the final chapter struck me as the most ummm striking. They likened today's AI quest to the quest for flight. People had been trying to build birds that could fly instead of building planes. Likewise it seems like the goal for some general AI is to build machines with human-like intelligence. Personally, I think this is somewhat bogus. We (humans) aren't that smart. Most of the progress in AI has been made when there was some specific task at hand - web searching, speech synthesis, lang. theory etc. I think A.I. people are better off focusing on specific tasks that will enhance the human computing experience, rather than trying to create 'thinking machines' via understanding our brain's model. Its probably the only template we have to work with but it could be possible that, like with flying, we won't be able to build flying birds no matter how hard we try.

Combinatorics
This course is going to help me practice a lot of my forgotten math ... we'll see how it shapes up.

Computer Graphics
I've always wanted to learn this subject. It seems like graphics developers are in demand now and I like pretty pictures. Maybe this will help rekindle my interest in game programming again. Plus, I like pretty pictures :). This might also tie in nicely with another year long project i'm thinking of doing as part of my senior thesis.

Automatic Group Theory
This course is going to tie up the Infinite Groups and Language theory stuff I did last semester. The material seems very interesting so we'll see how it goes. Its basically a presentation for groups as finite state machines ... fuuun .. ha


Coxeter Groups Study for Senior Thesis
So this is perhaps the most exciting thing i'm doing this semester. Thats because I think i've managed to come up with a project that sounds exciting enough to keep me interested for a year, and combines a lot of my interests and previous courses.
ie. a Coxeter Group Cayley Graph Visualizer (CGCGV - i already named it ... ha)
It takes a group presentation as input ... i could just use the coxeter matrix for the groups i'm interested in .... and produces the groups Cayley Graph as output.
My Infinite Groups prof said this had already been done for finite coxeter groups ... I'm thinking of a more general program that needs only to restrain the ball of radius for whatever graph. I'm going to implement it as a mac application using Cocoa and Obj-C. We'll see how this goes.

On another note, my Adium plugin currently has 1213 downloads, yaay!! I have some enhancements in mind i.e. AddressBook integration. I'll try and set aside some time for that soon. I wanted to finish my logging enhancements for Adium first but then EXCEL poster stuff came up ... and now school is starting (if only i could dilate time).

Anyways thats how things are shaping up. The new freshman class is cool. I sensed lots of intelligent minds at yesterday's bbq. We'll see how they cope with Lafayette.
Its time to get back to work now ... I'll post up a lot of my code stuff for this sem .. maybe even use an svn web repository type thing ... we'll see