Worksheet 2

Questions for Worksheet 2:

1. Formulate a research question for your project.
2. When developing a research question you must produce a question that can be answered by performing literature research, practical experimentation and critical analysis. The question should also focus the activities of your project.
What is the focus of your project?
What information do you need to find out about?
What Experimental work do you need to perform?
3. How will the information that you obtain in 2 allow you to answer the research question

1. My research question would be something to the effect of "How would AI in a driving game use slipstreaming to it's best advantage and how can current techniques used be improved?". Something along the lines of that anyway.

2.The focus of my project would be to research and build a more challanging racing AI. By looking into different techinques used and seeing if any of them can be improved upon. I will need to find the current best way, according to the industry, of using slipstreaming and looking for potential problems and finding a way to solve them. My plan is to build a simple AI that simply follows the track and another AI that tried to overtake it using the slipstream caused by the car infront.

3. If I can experiment with different ways of using slipstreaming, I can time laps around the course and see which is the fastest. Since it is a racing game and lap times will be monitored, it will be easy to look into which was the quickest and why.

Thanks :D

Worksheet 1

Hello! My original idea for my hon's project is to look into Driving AI but in particular looking into how an AI would deal with slipstreaming and use it to it's advantage. Slipstreaming is when there is a car infront another car during a race. Since they are driving fast, the air pressure acts against the car slowing it down, however if the a car has something to break the air pressure infront it, such as another car, then they can actually move faster since there is less pressure slowing the car down.

I wish to look into this and see if there are problems with the current way of doing it, and why more racing games do not have this feature. I also wish to look into the different ways that this can be done, and see if it can be improved upon.

For thsi idea, I would build a program that would simply make 2 cars go around a track. (If time allows I wish to do a complex track so that thety AI would have to take into account the corners when trying to overtake, however if this is not realistic, I wish to do just an oval track). One car would travel at a constant speed around the track, where as the other car would try to use slipstreaming to try and get infront of it.

I hope this is a good enough description, if you wish to know more about my idea, comment away! :D Thanks!