Prize Motivational Page

Swarm-based optimisation systems have existed for a long time but in a very specific context. They were typically purpose built exclusively for some very specific application and only for that application. They were designed to solve the problem in as efficient as possible and were not meant to guide their users' thinking by helping them to perceive the complex emergent behaviours they were using. Rather, it was up to the capacity of their user to understand from numerical reports and outputs, what behaviours were occuring and how to proceed from there. In this respect, the creation of a general purpose, extensible, graphical real-time visualiser is something of a first.

The program supports adjustable graphical rendering of the visualisations including: Another aspect of why our project may be considered innovative is the lack of reliance on external libraries for system critical components. Excepting the GUI, the Optimisers, Objective Functions and Graphics Processor were coded by us, for us and these components alone highlight the great leaps that we have made towards creating a new and useful system for academics and amateurs alike.

Our project is innovative because it creates an extremely powerful tool that can be used by people to visually see the mathematical performance of a swarm-based optimisation process. A free tool that is available for anyone to make use of to understand and employ swarm-based methods without having to be experts in data analysis.

Consider first, the use of the MVC Pattern. We have made use of a modified variant of the MVC architecture but the essence of the pattern is easily seen in the system in terms of the mapping between Model,View and Controller to Snapshot Manager(Data Store), Graphical Display and Manager component. We have very clearly followed the essence of the MVC pattern to create a response system that realises the scalability and performance goals outlined in the initial project specification.

Finally, our project shows good use of appropriate design patterns to achieve the goals of flexibility and extensibility. The use of hierarchial designs for Optimisers and Objective Functions means that new objective functions can easily added to the system without major code rewrites. Furthermore, it also means that, due to a separation of concerns between levels in the hierarchy, modifications to existing optimisers and objective functions can be done without forcing extensive changes.

The second most important aspect would be the realisation of an Event-Driven system. Our system operates fundamentally on a process described as

• An Optimiser produces a System State(Snapshot)
• The snapshot is stored in our data store
• The Graphics processor removes a snapshot and renders it

Here we clearly see an example of creating Events(a snapshot), and how the system processing the event realises the behaviour we require. Without this implementation of this particular architectural idea, the project would not perform nearly as well as this allows us to synchronise the performance of Optimiser and Graphics Processor together even though they operate at generally different speeds.

We have always committed to showing our client software demos instead of documentation. As far as possible, throughout the development cycle, we have delivered prototypical instances of software and components to demonstrate our development progress. Showing and presenting working software has always been more important to us than reliance on documentation and we still stand by our commitment.

Agile espouses responsive development that changes as and when the requirements do. Similarly, we have committed to ensuring that our development focus is never too narrow that we cannot adapt to changing demands or challenges. We have shown this by our project undergoing several drastic changes in design throughout its lifespan but instead of requiring us to restart, we would adapt our model and continue to develop.

We at Team Dragon Brain have always believed in the value of the project and each of our members has been exceedingly motivated to see it brought to fruition regardless of the many challenges that we have had to face. This motivation and drive stems from a deepseated passion for the field Artificial Intelligence and the great joy to be had in high quality graphics.