afterdusk / ab-scissors

Learn and practise alpha-beta pruning

aB-Scissors

I learn the best through practice. So when I first learnt adversarial search for Intro to AI, I struggled with minimax and alpha beta pruning. That is, until I actually did some questions and built an understanding through making mistakes and finding out why they were mistakes. The problem was that actual questions and answers were limited: this app addresses this by generating practice questions and answers. Additionally, it provides a way to check the answers for questions from past year papers. Since I worked on adversarial search for my AI project over the past semester, this was a natural application of that experience.

Wireframing

I’ve opted with material design as a design language for its ubiquity. I was heavily inspired by the resources featured in this medium post; the designs showcase the sheer power of material design beyond web apps with intentionally simple user interfaces.

Requirements/Prototyping

This is pretty much a passion project at this stage, so I have not put much thought into requirements. The list may grow, but at this stage I want the application to:

1. Be static (and as lightweight as possible)
2. Be built in an extensible way

After some exploration, I found create-react-app suitable given the application's use case (as well as my inexperience with react...). material-ui also makes the job of implementing material design entirely painless, while vx (built on top of d3) draws clean and largely customisable trees.

Current Stage: Building

More like: desperately attempting to squeeze an hour of dev time everyday while working a full-time internship