Month: April 2023

Hi!

I’ve officially run out of blog topics, so I’m going to expand upon Aarav’s (hi Aarav) blog about Genetic algorithms (we are on the same software engineering team, so I think this is alright!)

It’s also been awhile since his blog, and we’ve had to rework a lot of how our code works. 

Let’s start from the very beginning!

We have this really great spreadsheet that helps us to read data in. You can see it below:

We pretty much process all of this data into our code, and save it for later. 

After that’s done we need to make a bunch of really bad schedules (the initial generation, think Mendel’s original green and white pea plants), this is where we start with. Basically, we just have to put together 8 lists of room/teacher/class assignments (that makes one schedule, since each list represents a class period, multiplied by 8 makes a full day). Let’s say we have 100 of these to start out. 

Something we’ve improved from last time was the schedules we generate are actually possible schedules! That doesn’t sound super good, but our old code used to stick random teachers with random classes (think of Ms. Hitzeman teaching Software Engineering  – sorry Ms. Hitzeman :)). Now, we start all of our schedules off on the right foot. 

Any time we’re making a new schedule, we have a lot of “Teacher” objects: think various versions of Hamlet. We know each version of Hamlet has a super dramatic “To be or not to be” speech, weird dynamics between Hamlet and Gertrude, along with many other similarities. 

Like each version of Hamlet, where each is different but all have constant ideas/people/scenes, each “Teacher” object has a designated “Class” they teach, as well as a designated “Room” they teach that class in. Since we’d rather not store these values for every teacher for every period manually, we have two lists that hold these values. 

We have a class_list variable, think of it like Hamlet’s revenge checklist. He must talk to Horatio, out Claudius as a killer with the players, kill Polonius, and fence with Laertes. Similarly, each teacher object contains a list like this: [AP Lit, 2, Ap Lit, Lunch, 5, 6, 7, 8]. These hold class data for us. 

Next, we have to make changes to make better schedules. For example, while Ms. Hitzeman could teach 8 classes every single day, that probably isn’t good or healthy for her – so by randomly replacing teachers/classes/rooms between schedules, we can slightly alter how each schedule works (theoretically if we do this enough, combined with the next two steps, we’ll get a good schedule).

Now we have a bunch of mutated schedules, we need to get rid of the bad ones and add new ones! 

Think of making schedules like a AP Lit Hamlet Academic discussion: while we can have 20 people talk for the entire period, what they contribute to the conversation will probably decrease over time. So if we swap out the old people (delete a bad schedule) and sub in a fresh perspective (generating another schedule) then we can keep the very insightful Hamlet discussion going. 

After we do this, we’ve successfully progressed a single generation! If we go back to the AP lit discussion, let’s say that’s one period of discussion. (For the example to work let’s pretend people get carried over from period to period). 

I’m in second period, so let’s say we bring in the 3rd period kids. They’re all new and have great things to add to our conversation! So by progressing to another generation, where we repeat the previous 5-10 steps, we continue talking about how random Hamlet sometimes is and definitely how heroic Horatio is – all while a function is checking to see if we’ve reached a good schedule (think Ms. Hitzeman writing notes until someone finally arrives to the most insightful thing to discuss about Hamlet ever). 

We rinse and repeat for maybe 1000 generations (that would be a lot of AP discussions!), and once we’ve finally reached a good schedule, we save it and output it! 

Some other cool parts about our genetic algorithm: 

This is our super technologically advanced and modernly designed home page!!! Made by the illustrious Jonathan Qunell. Very cool I know. This site is just set up so the teacher who would want to generate schedules simply inputs the values into the spreadsheet I showed above, uploads it through upload data, then can create a schedule using that data, and finally can view any old schedules generated. 

Thanks for reading! I hope this provides some much-needed insight into Hamlet quantified programming.

-Max

This spring break I went on a cruise with my family! I’m going to talk about my adventures. 

It was a 7-day cruise leaving from Galveston, TX. We were going to 3 ports, two in Mexico and one in Honduras. We had to get up at 3 AM to make the one-day drive! 

Luckily I had a ton of work that night, so I just worked through the night and slept in the car. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m really not a fan of road trips. The constant bumpy movements, music that’s either too loud or just loud enough to be annoying, and the heat from the sun creates a pretty bad travel environment, especially in a super limited space like the car backseat. 

My agenda items for the road trip: Survive without getting super headachey, read a couple of books, and recover my sleep. 

We arrived in Houston at 9:48 pm, 12 minutes before the restaurant where our dinner was waiting for us. We got a couple of pounds of seafood boil, which was super tasty after the extremely long road trip. Unfortunately, I have no pictures! 

The next morning we drove 2 hours to Galveston and boarded our cruise. I expected the security process to be long and tedious, but it took about an hour and then we were on the ship! Since we dropped off our luggage we made our way to one of the three dining rooms available at the time and had some really good shrimp and beef tenderloin (picture below). 

After lunch, we went to check out the ship! Somehow instead of exploring the main exciting areas of the boat, like the buffet or the pools, we went to the very top and got locked out (since staff didn’t think people would go right to deck 19), and had to get let back in by a staff member. 

For the first few days of the cruise, when we were at sea, my days looked a lot like this:

I totally didn’t finish my voices novel in 2 days……

While I’m super carsick, boats are surprisingly not bad at all, 90% of the time it felt like we were on land. Which I guess is lucky for me – most of my family was hit pretty hard with seasickness. 

These days at sea I also told myself I would do the onboard activities – so between ping pong tournaments, culinary demonstrations, and origami classes, I got to meet a lot of shipmates. 

Do you know how most cruise ships have stores you can shop at? I never thought I’d spend my time in any of these – but low and behold I spent almost as much time in the jewelry store as I did the buffet. 

There’s a good reason, however! They were giving out these charms – most were related to our actual cruise (a ship wheel with our cruise line’s logo, the ports we visited). 

As a joke, I told my family that we should collect all 6-7 charms that were spaced out over the cruise… everyone picked up on it and it became our daily tradition for a week to go collect our charm things. 

Once we got to the ports the cruise was super fun! Not only did we have the same great cruise amenities, but there was also an entire port to explore (not to mention the ship was completely still – for some reason the restaurants would be super rocky even though the rest of the ship was good. 

POV my dad in Cozumel (or was it Costa Maya? One of the two).

Since my sister was taking this week off from school (even though she still had classes) we only visited each port for a couple of hours, especially since there really wasn’t that much to do besides buy super touristy stuff or lie on the beach. 

After the 3 sea days, we had three port days, each in a new destination. Our schedule every day would pretty much be waking up at 7, getting breakfast then start exploring the port at 8. At about 10 we’d either 1) Exhaust what each destination had or 2) Get really hot with the sun beating down. We’d return to the ship at about 11 and have a good 4 hours with all the cruise amenities to ourselves. That was super nice! 

Overall I really enjoyed my cruise! Was a great way to refresh after January, Feb, and March. I would definitely make it a spring break tradition – it’s like a normal vacation except you don’t have to worry about transportation, food, hotels, entertainment,   and a bunch of other great things. 

-Max