
What are some fun project ideas in machine learning? :) - knowledgesale
Behold, a thread where people who wish some machine learning-based webservice, library/framework or application existed meet people who are looking for a fun project idea to implement! Pure magic.
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S4M
I have an idea of a project involving Machine Learning, applied to the game of
chess:

You would need a large database of chess games and a program that can detect
some features in a position (for example: "white are a pawn up", "black pawn
structure is better", "black king is not safe", etc.).

The idea would be to see if some features in a position are making one side
more likely to win. For example, we might find that being a piece up makes one
side more likely to win, since the largest majority of the cases when one side
had a piece up, it ended up winning.

But that's not an interesting result. What I would like to see if it's
possible to discover features that are good for one side, and which we didn't
know about.

I didn't have time to start anything about it, though.

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keefe
Have you checked out chess problems and go problems? They're usually presented
in bulk in structured data. <http://www.chessproblems.com/> I haven't look at
any in a long time, but it at least should highlight some problems hard for
humans, which implies something can be learned there, imho.

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S4M
Thanks for the link, but that's not exactly what I wanted. The chess problem
you are showing are some composition problem: someone creating a position
where it is possible to checkmate in two moves, but the moves are very
unintuitive and the position is completely unnatural, which is very hard for a
human player to find the solution. A computer, on the other hand, will have no
problem to find it by brute force.

What I want is something different: mining tons of games to learn new stuff
about positional strength in chess. For example, assume that we don't know
that a queen is stronger than a knight, and instead think that the two pieces
have the same value. We would trade those two pieces more or less
indifferently, resulting in lots of games where one side has a queen and the
other side has a knight. Now, the program I would like to do will mine all
those games and say "99% of the cases where one side had a queen and the other
side had a knight were a win for the side with the queen". And we would be
able to learn that a queen is stronger to a knight... Now obviously this
example is too simple, but I would like to see if it is possible to learn some
more subtle things.

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tectonic
I posted some a little while ago:
[http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2012/04/22/machine-
learni...](http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2012/04/22/machine-learning-
project-ideas/)

~~~
eshvk
Very cool.

Just wondering out loud reg. your idea to a have a rick roll detector: How
exactly would that work? A brute force approach would be to compare how
similar the target video is to some sample rick roll videos, I am guessing
music matching could be attempted since frame by frame duplicate detection of
the video is insanely hard.

From a machine learning perspective, it gets harder because a good rick roll
entices the target into clicking the link which turns out to be a false
positive. On the other hand, the link could be completely normal so the
features of the link itself or not necessarily useful. Hmmm...

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Wilduck
Here are the final projects for CS 229: Machine Learning at Stanford.

<http://cs229.stanford.edu/projects2012.html>

Take any of these studies, and try to replicate or extend it. They're all
pretty interesting and come with the advantage that you get to see how someone
else approached the problem as well.

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knowledgesale
This is very helpful and what I was looking for. Thank you.

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annon2003
Animal sound detector

Speech recognition for cows,dogs,birds etc.

Moo,chirp,meow

~~~
knowledgesale
Whoah, sounds interesting! What could it be for, any applications in mind?

~~~
singularity2001
maybe a birdwatcher app. because mostly birdwatchers do not see their targets
but only hear it.

and of course a siri plugin: hey siri, what sound/song is that?

