   Help me decide on a science fair project!
  I'm going to enter the The Greater St. Louis Science Fair and I need to do good enough to qualify for the big nationwide one. Looking through last years winners everyone did a bio project with the exception of one involving a hydrogen fuel cell.I'm going to do a purely computer science project. It might have relationships to biology or robotics but the heart of it is going to consist of good old code.There are several types of projects you can do, I'm doing an "Invention" type. Here's the info on that:Quote:The object of an invention/engineering study is to solve a problem by creating a new machine or process. Once a person has created the invention/engineering, one should build and test a prototype. This testing stage will create the data for an invention/engineering study. Test what effect changing either the invention/engineering or operating conditions has on the performance of the invention/engineering.When creating an invention study, first look for a problem to solve.So basically I'm looking for some type of problem I can solve or process that could be improved upon. Ideally I'd like it to be something everyday people like the judges can relate to while also having a "wow" factor.I'm not too good with pure maths but I have pretty good instincts when it comes to innovation and creative ways problem solving.So help me win this fair and recommend a topic for me!Also: If anyone who's been in a science fair before could give me some general tips that'd be great.Thanks to everyone who helps me.   
  Are you in the Grade 9 or Grade 10 devision? The majority of the projects in these devisions were bio.   ;  Write a heuristic for the Travelling Salesman Problem.  People do doctoral theses on this, so anyone who know Computer Science know how hard it is.   ;  I've been in a science fair this year i made it. It does not matter what you do it in. As long as you can back up what you have to say. Did they give you a rubric to follow. If you want to do good just follow the rubric they give you. My whole class had to do a scince fair project. I got a 99 becuase my teacher did not want me to get a 100 just by following the rubric.  Yeah you have bio and you get to program. how about AI thats another possiblity.;  Celestlial navigation. How about given a sequence of images of the stars from within space, write a program that finds the stars in the image. Based on different positions of stars between images, approximate distance and be able to orient your "ship" anywhere in space where you have enough known stars.  Maybe include something that after collecting data for a while, your ship can be transported to any arbitrary position in space.  It can then gather data about the stars in your current location, approximate distance, and see if it can find a pattern in the previously known data to reorient itself.In other words, constellation navigation needs of a very fast moving, and possibly teleporting (damn spacial anomalies) starship in 3d space.Although I bet someone at nasa has already solved this one.  I would check first.Or how about a program that randomly generates without human input plausible novels.  Not quite like Racter.;  AI and robotics is always interesting. Something practical is better (people relate better to that). Things like Roomba (the vacuum robot). Someone had to program the floor-mapping AI for that thing. You could do something similar, even if only on a virtual basis. Actually building a robot is probably out of your scope. Less "sciency" but still cool is urban myth / practical science applications. Things like "Which batteries really last longer?" or "Which brand of gasoline is more efficient?"The key here is something regular people can relate to. Not everybody is into protein synthesis and whatnot. It can be nerdy, but make sure to bring it down to earth.   ;Quote:Are you in the Grade 9 or Grade 10 devision? The majority of the projects in these devisions were bio.I'm in the honors division, they don't divide it by grade in my fair.Quote:Write a heuristic for the Travelling Salesman Problem. People do doctoral theses on this, so anyone who know Computer Science know how hard it is.That sounds interesting, a little too ordinary tho.Quote:I've been in a science fair this year i made it. It does not matter what you do it in. As long as you can back up what you have to say. Did they give you a rubric to follow. If you want to do good just follow the rubric they give you. My whole class had to do a scince fair project. I got a 99 becuase my teacher did not want me to get a 100 just by following the rubric. Yeah you have bio and you get to program. how about AI thats another possiblity.Sounds like you did a classroom assignement rather than an actual fair.Quote:Or how about a program that randomly generates without human input plausible novels. Not quite like Racter.That sounds like a sweet idea.Meh, I was hoping for more than 5 replies. Hopefully this bump will get me them.   ;  Do something on the forefront of graphics tech, maybe. I dunno. I did one on AI way back in the early 90s (researched by all the discredited near-technical "future fanboy" books and Lisp manuals I could find) and ended up writing a simplistic text parser in HyperTalk. Not knowing the difference between the future-fanboy books (which I later discovered were written in the late 70s) and actual academic journals, I concluded that sentient artificial intelligence was less than 20 years out. [rolleyes]It looks like you've done genetic algorithm work before; why not study that? There's all kinds of interesting academic work on that. Maybe write a GA to solve some problem or find its way out of a maze. I think some crap at my university was using GAs to handle image analysis, but it ended up being stillborn after a funding freeze.Edit: Actually, a genetic algorithm bolted to procedural content generation would be totally awesome; you could talk about procedural game content like Spore as an aside and end up writing a couple graphics hacks to create crazy textures. It'd probably be useful to your life outside of school too.   ;  Thats sounds interesting ravuya, didn't know all the terms u used tho.Neural networks and GAs are my kind of thing so if anyone else has some more neat stuff do with them please tell me.   