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I want to find out how big a programming project can you take while you are still at college. Have any of your guys created something amazing (a program of course) while you were in your college ? Also, I would like to know if there are people who are not computer science students, just passionate geeks, who have undertaken any serious programming projects.

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In short, I would like you all to share your coding adventures while you were at college. –  aakashbhowmick Jan 13 '11 at 19:28
Probably needs to be CW –  Paul R Jan 13 '11 at 19:30
@Paul R: No, not CW...should be P.SE. –  IAbstract Jan 13 '11 at 19:47
I wrote an Elevator System in JAVA –  Angelina Oct 3 '13 at 20:04
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closed as not a real question by bdukes, T.E.D., Jim Lewis, Eugene Mayevski 'EldoS Corp, Jeff Atwood Jan 14 '11 at 4:16


6 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

I wrote a machine learning program in Java that learned how to play the triangle game you see at Cracker Barrel, Denny's, etc...where you jump over other adjacent pegs, removing them as you go, and you're considered a genius if you only have 1 peg left.

(First I had to make the game too)

I also made different classes that it used as its learning methods, such as high rewards for doing well, sharper punishments for doing poorly, random compensation, super-optimist compensation where everything just got varying degrees of good, super-pessimism where everything got varying degrees of bad, etc. It was very interesting to see how a machine reacts to discipline based on the decisions it makes.

After it was done learning, every different method was pitted against another to see which could reach "genius" status by consistently leaving only 1 peg left each game. The results got automatically put into an Excel spreadsheet, and all I had to do was make simple graphs to see how long it took them to learn, who learned best, etc.

I'm currently working on implementing a new classifier for the ALISA software system. It started at George Washington University, and my professor recommended I take a look at it. I'm working on finding a way to have it look at digital images and identify what parts are metallic surfaces, as well as what type of metal it might be. A lot of the background stuff is similar to the above project, so I'm pretty excited to work on it.

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Also as a side project a friend and I are taking a web programming project we did last semester and turning it into something bigger and better...it's a crime map (google maps based) similar to what you'd see pinned up at a police station, with little clickable flags that determine what the crime is. Then you can add/remove crimes in real time. Now we're working on a way to scrape data from the local PD website to make it more legit instead of just sample data. not a huge project, but interesting (i can link if interested, but it shows some minimal personal data) –  rownage Jan 13 '11 at 19:55
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I wrote a simple OS - it wasn't linux - it did not do a whole lot - but it did work: paged memory management, preemptive multitasking, loadable programs, device drivers (hard disk, floppy serial port, console), resource management, file system. It had some micro kernal aspects to it too - for instance the memory manager was a task of it's own - and did not use the application's thread.

No code was taken from anywhere else. There was a lot of ASMm, but also C/C++ in there too.

It was cool to write and say I did, but in a world with linux already done - it was just a toy.

It would be SO much easier to do today - with VMs and stuff.

/ahhhh nostalgia.

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My favorite was probably in my compilers class. I wrote a from scratch compiler for a dialect of Pascal. It was fun doing all of the parsing and semantic analysis to verify the code was valid. In the end, it generated MIPS assembly which we ran via SPIM. It was one of the bigger projects I worked on.

The other was something we did for our senior design project, and was something a bunch of us wanted to keep working on afterwards, but never did: https://gna.org/projects/gossip

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If you count graduate work, answers to this question would read like a who's-who of software.

For instance, I believe email, gopher, and the first web browsers all started of as school projects.

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In high school I recreated Super Mario Bros. for my senior project.

Then I revisited it one semester in college and redid the entire project.

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I did an application for Halliburton, it was pretty small, altought they didn't use it in the end, since it needed to have SQL Server, even the Express edition, they wanted to buy the full version, in the end they aske me to move it to Access, but in my opinion, Access is to lame (yes i'm a Linux fan), for a big application.

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