Week 12: The Very Best Beast

And with that, my senior project has ended! My presentations went really great, and my final deliverable turned out fairly good all things considered.

Presentation

Lower School

On Tuesday, Samantha G., Alexa L., and I journeyed to BASIS Independent Brooklyn Lower School to give the 1st and 2nd graders presentations on our senior projects. Each of the 4 times that I gave my 7-minute spiel on Pokémon to those kids, I could hear their bumbling excitement as I got ready to present and they saw the giant text saying “Pokémon” on the first slide. I really enjoyed getting to share the project with them, they were all so fun and it really eased my nerves going into the ~actual~ presentation.

I went through the idea of Pokémon, neural networks, training neural networks, and my intentions behind the project with them. After I was done, it was really hard to get the idea of presenting to kids out of my head. Having fun as a presenter with a presentation and making sure the audience is also engaged and having fun is just super enjoyable, and I was scared that my real one wouldn’t have that same magic.

Upper School

Come Friday, and I was psyched out of my mind to present. I really loved how the presentation came out with all the 3D models and transitions, as well as the topic itself. While I downed a bottle of water in the minutes leading up to it, actually speaking went surprisingly naturally. I barely looked at the slides — the information just kinda flowed out. Hopefully I also knew how to pace myself in presenting, though I’ll have to wait for the recording to see that for myself. I hope that I communicated the concepts well enough to be understood by people without an extensive math/CS background.

Retrospective

I loved getting the chance to do this project. I learned so much about coding basics, machine learning (which I think will be a fairly important skillset in the coming years), data scraping/parsing, and most importantly, Pokémon. Going forward I want to refine the program, as so much of it has become redundant over the creation process. I also want to train it more and define more specific rules for outputs, so it can for example know explicitly not to pair the outputs “Switch” and “Attack” together. Or, maybe I can even find out how to limit the outputs to only be ones possible from a Pokémon by looking at its movepool.

One piece of feedback from my presentation that I got was potential overcomplexity in the network that could cause overfitting. I aim to look more into more detailed neural network structuring paradigms. Finally, I want to try extending the network to work on a more large-scale gameplan rather than turn-by-turn, though I would like to have more active mentorship if I were to pursue this avenue. There are so many ways I could take the framework this project helped me lay down.

Thank-you’s

I’d like to use this last bit to thank some people who helped me in this project.

Ricardo Lopes for being my senior project advisor and helping me directly connect Pokémon and data science, as well as being a good general resource.

Mark Opirhory for keeping my project in line and keeping an eye on me throughout as I came in practically every day to discuss with him.

Yuna Stechert for lending an ear to my woes and taking me to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for a workplace one day.

Anbo Chen for giving me some guidance with Java, Python, and Mathematica in terms of coding languages and workflows.

Diego Griffin for battletesting with me online to help me figure out portions of the code through trial and error, and stopping me from getting stuck.

Jo Goldfarb for helping me in the initial stages of the project in trying to find an advisor, as well as orchestrating the talk with the lower school at the end.

Jacob Helzner for guiding me through the senior project process from the student perspective, and helping plan out the project trajectory.

My parents for giving me free space and letting me do the project in peace.

All my other friends (not listed) for emotional support throughout.

Gabriella Baessa for help with the yearbook concurrent to the senior project work.

And of course,

Valued readers for keeping up with this roller coaster of a project throughout.

Thank you so, so much! I hope to do more great things in the future!

All the best,

Alex R.