Theory and Algorithms Commons^™

An Exploration Of Procedural Methods In Game Level Design, Hector Salinas

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Video games offer players immersive experiences within intricately crafted worlds, and the integration of procedural methods in game level designs extends this potential by introducing dynamic, algorithmically generated content that could stand on par with handcrafted environments. This research highlights the potential to provide players with engaging experiences through procedural level generation, while potentially reducing development time for game developers.

Through a focused exploration on two-dimensional cave generation techniques, this paper aims to provide efficient solutions tailored to this specific environment. This exploration encompasses several procedural generation methods, including Midpoint Displacement, Random Walk, Cellular Automata, Perlin Worms, and Binary Space …

Universal Computation Using Self-Assembling, Crisscross Dna Slats, Jackson S. Bullard

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

I first give a brief introduction to formal models of computation. I then present three different approaches for computation in the aTAM. I later detail generating systems of crisscross slats given an arbitrary algorithm encoded in the form of a Turing machine. Crisscross slats show potential due to their high levels of cooperativity, so it is hoped that implementations utilizing slats are more robust to various growth errors compared to the aTAM. Finally, my software converts arbitrary crisscross slat systems into various physical representations that assist in analyzing their potential to be realized in experiments.

A Comparison Of Word Embedding Techniques For Similarity Analysis, Tyler Gerth

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

There have been a multitude of word embedding techniques developed that allow a computer to process natural language and compare the relationships between different words programmatically. In this paper, similarity analysis, or the testing of words for synonymic relations, is used to compare several of these techniques to see which performs the best. The techniques being compared all utilize the method of creating word vectors, reducing words down into a single vector of numerical values that denote how the word relates to other words that appear around it. In order to get a holistic comparison, multiple analyses were made, with …

Trunctrimmer: A First Step Towards Automating Standard Bioinformatic Analysis, Z. Gunner Lawless, Dana Dittoe, Dale R. Thompson, Steven C. Ricke

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Bioinformatic analysis is a time-consuming process for labs performing research on various microbiomes. Researchers use tools like Qiime2 to help standardize the bioinformatic analysis methods, but even large, extensible platforms like Qiime2 have drawbacks due to the attention required by researchers. In this project, we propose to automate additional standard lab bioinformatic procedures by eliminating the existing manual process of determining the trim and truncate locations for paired end 2 sequences. We introduce a new Qiime2 plugin called TruncTrimmer to automate the process that usually requires the researcher to make a decision on where to trim and truncate manually after …