Today we met with several members of Dr. Laber’s organization who have been involved in several outreach activities to educate people about topics in AI, statistics, and computer science. For the past two years they have been working on a game called Mount Boredoom, focusing on the applications of dynamic programming. Mount Boredoom is a game where you control a goat on a mountain who has been trying to gather flowers, while trees that can fire pinecones try to stop you. The trees rotate every time you move, and you must avoid them on your way to the flowers. Dynamic programming is a computer programming method where the programmer breaks a problem into smaller subsets recursively until the problems can no longer be divided. It has many applications ranging from aerospace engineering to economics. It can also be used to solve the problem posed by Mount Boredoom, in where you are able to break apart your overall path into each individual movement and recursively optimize it to get the best score. The overlay in-game that allowed us to do this gave us a greater understanding of dynamic programming and enlightened us to its usefulness and applications.
