Exploring Artificial Intelligence is an exciting prospect for non-professional programming (it's a quite rare part of professional programming). Rather than criticize others for being On Intelligence) Architecture on Tic-Tac-Toe
Naturally Speaking 8 ), the underlying processing is still realtime (and, last time I checked, single threaded). This is foolish! I would love to take a crack at processor- and database/Internet-intensive voice recognition. For instance, rank every word-pair alternate via their Google distance (the # of Google returns for the word pair); use WordNet to create alternate parse trees from alternates; apply multiple noise filters to the input to see if the recognition changes; use the database of prior recognition for a dictionary, etc.
Note that I'm not talking about the actual transformation of a sound file into a text alternate -- leave that to the existing, pretty easy-to-use APIs. I'm talking about primarily about intense post-processing (and, for the application of filters to the .WAV file, pre-).
For a short project, the focus would have to be very tight. There are two holy grails for this type of voice recognition: voicemail and in-car dictation. My idea would be the recognition of one- to two-sentence task-oriented utterances: "Pick up bacon at the store," and "Call Bob back."
Generating Narratives
My hunch on consciousness is that it is a semi-continuous narrative whose form is generated by relatively hard-coded rules that interact with a "grammar organ" and whose subject is focused by subliminal processes controlling attention and intention. Obviously, I'm hand-waving huge problems relating to these subliminal aspects, but I think that between WordNet, Wikipedia, and Google, there's a real potential for generating complex narratives, even while punting on the underlying intention. In other words, I think that you could at least win the Loebner Prize... An Evolvable DSL For Poker AI The program GS2 is favored to win the \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx?id=73f8b834-1171-4917-9d9c-546313e15f05&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.cs.ualberta.ca%2f%7epokert%2f"" target=_blank rel="noopener noreferrer">AAAI Computer Poker Competition in a few days. GS2 apparently dynamically develops its strategy based on game theory. An evolvable DSL that described poker strategies would be fascinating.
Evolving Teams for Fantasy/Rotisserrie Leagues
One of the nice things about fantasy baseball/football/etc. is that you have a task that's driven essentually by statistics and chance, so you have a good chance at creating a system that could reliably beat poor human players. The task here would be to create a \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx?id=73f8b834-1171-4917-9d9c-546313e15f05&url=http%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fLearning_classifier_system"" target=_blank rel="noopener noreferrer">Learning Classifier System from which you could extract "good" rules.
Autonomous Blimpbot
Robotics are the new personal computers. If I had the soldering skillz, I'd love to create a self-directing robotic blimp: start with a \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx?id=73f8b834-1171-4917-9d9c-546313e15f05&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.hobbytron.net%2fmach3_rc_blimp.html"" target=_blank rel="noopener noreferrer">remote-controlled blimp with a mounted camera, hack a digital controller ("miracle happens here" for me, but for other people, I'm sure it's do-able), and go forth.