I'm still trying to find a specific project topic for my senior thesis, but I have been narrowing down the possibilities quite a bit. As I have mentioned earlier, I want to do a project in the field of swarm intelligence. I don't think I have the expertise or time to come up with an algorithm from scratch which would counter existing ones, so I am most likely going to be applying an existing algorithm of swarm intelligence to a particular problem (and possibly making some slight variations to the algorithm afterwards). I also don't have the hardware experience to implement this with robotics, so I will most likely be running a simulation to test the application of this algorithm.
If I can find a topic that the algorithm has not been applied to yet (in literature) then it could be considered research, otherwise my thesis would be just mainly a software implementation project for the purposes of learning. Therefore, my main goal now is to find an application for the swarm intelligence algorithm.
The applications that would work best are those in which there is a definite measure of performance - where it would be easy to show if, and how well, the swarm intelligence method is working (compared to some other method). I think my best choices would be a simulation of simple (enough) natural system, or a simple task (simple path finding?). I'm going to try and meet with one of my professors at Willamette University this week (one who specializes in Artificial Intelligence and Simulations) to try and further refine my list of possible applications, and hope to have my application picked by next week so that I can actually start work on my project.
You know, this sounds similar to what Alex and I were originally ATTEMPTING to do. I would say I hope you have better luck that we did, but I know you will...you won't be working with Alex :P
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