To read an overview of how this course is proposed to take place see

• Independent Study Proposal

A relaxing, yet busy summer away from school and this project

• 1+ week

It has been approximately 4 months since Matt and I have worked on this project. I have found it vastly beneficial and even mandatory to spend time reviewing a paused project, to get back up to speed. There are extensive notes, wiki documentation, written notes of ideas, checked out library books, and existing code that I should refer back to.

I plan to go through as much of the material created in the prior project as I can, in a roughly sequential order. Basically its like replaying the prior project in high speed through my mind, so as to ascertain some of the details and “here-is-where-we-are-at” status.

Code-wise, Matt had got some of his convexification ideas implemented in rough approximation. Errors needed to be worked out. I am not sure what additional progress he has made, so I will look into this. I personally was working on a generic-ish evolutionary algorithm that is similar to Simulated Annealing. I was successful in coding some of the framework that it would sit within in a VBA coding construct. I had setup worksheets, decided on formats, and coded some of the generational randomizer, generational tracker, and other aspects. It is still a hollow shell of sorts though, because of reasons I do not specifically recall. It either wasn’t using real data yet, or the randomness wasn’t directed, or something of the sorts. The code has to be looked into and caught up on in my head.

• < 1 week

I want to put some thought into if, why, and how a change from using VBA to MATLAB for our evolutionary algorithm might take place. I will document the thought process, reasons for or against, and research into how it may be done.

• < 1 week (but continued for months)

I still have a great MATLAB instructional book that has gone vastly unread. I got one or two chapters in. I would like to read about, understand, and implement more MATLAB. It is tough to go from a very simple understanding, to the level that Matt is proficient on, and that our project requires. Therefore, I need to spend the next few months continually familiarizing and utilizing MATLAB. I expect this subject to be a continual goal for many weeks.