Weekly Journal: Week 1 (May21 to May27)

Victoria Manfredi
vmanfred@cs.smith.edu


I spent my first day reading some of Amy's research papers, some of her class notes, and various books, trying to understand what the project was all about. The project I am doing is based on some of Amy's papers that I read and a class paper written by one of her student's last year. We are going to look at different algorithms for pricebots and see which one makes the most profit and why that pricebot algorithm is so effective.

Then on my second day working for Amy I went to my first conference! This was really interesting and I spent much of the conference in awe of the research being done :-)

The rest of the week I spent working with the code for the program written by Amy's student who wrote the paper, and trying to determine whether the evolution part of the simulator was working correctly and whether all the algorithms were implemented properly. There are four pricebot algorithms implemented in the simulator program, and one of them isn't implemented properly so I am going to try and figure out the algorithm and how to implement it properly next week. The other algorithms appear to be implemented properly but the output, particularly which algorithm ended up doing the best didn't seem to be correct, so Amy and I spent the week trying to make sure that the other three algorithms and the evolution part of the code were all correct.

I also learned how to use the unix graphing tool gnuplot to plot the outputs of the simulator.


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