First post of Capstone progress. First thing I did was review my Capstone proposal paper to re familiarize myself. Immediately I begun work on the work I outlined for Week 1 in my timeline.

I built a generator for random initial board states for an 11 sliding tile-puzzle. I chose to have each board state be a solved state that was then subjected to a random number of moves. This is ensure that each state is solvable without having to check first. Another choice I made was to have each state be represented as a string with each tile being represented by a hexadecimal number and position represented by its index in string.The blank space is represented by “_”. This was done because a number of states will be generated during the AI’s decision making process so the states should be as small and compact as possible.

I also started to look into the tools for creating the neural network. So far I am looking at Tensorflow, Keras in combination with Python.