On Saturday morning, Simon didn’t go to the SAT examination location, although we had registered him to try taking the SAT (with great difficulties, because he is so young). In the course of the past few weeks, after trying a couple of practice SAT tests on the Khan Academy website, we have discovered that the test doesn’t reveal the depth of Simon’s mathematical talent (the tasks don’t touch the fields he is mostly busy with, like trigonometry, topology or calculus and require that instead, he solves much more primitive problems in a strictly timed fashion, while Simon prefers taking time to explore more complex projects). This is what happens with most standardized tests: Simon does have the knowledge but not the speed (because he hasn’t been training these narrow skills for hours on end as his older peers at school have). Nor does he have the desire to play the game (get that grade, guess the answers he deosn’t know), he doesn’t see the point. What did he do instead on his Saturday? He had a good night sleep (instead of having to show up at the remote SAT location at 8 a.m.) and then he…
built an A.I. applying a genetic algorithm, a neural network controlling cars moving on a highway! The cars use rays to avoid the walls of the highway. Implementing neuroevolution. What better illustration does one need to juxtapose true achievement and what today’s school system often wants us to view as achievemnt – getting a high grade on a test? The former is a beautiful page from Simon’s portfolio, showing what he really genuinely can do, a real life skill, something he is passionately motivated to explore deeper, without seeking a reward, his altruist contribution to the world, if you will. The latter says no more than how well one has been trained to apply certain strategies, in a competitive setting.
Simon’s code is online: https://repl.it/@simontiger/Raytracing-AI
Simon has put this version on GitHub: https://github.com/simon-tiger/Raycasting-A.I.
He has also created an improved version with an improved fitness function. “In the improved version, there’s a feature that only shows the best car (and you can toggle that feature on and off). And most importantly, I am now casting relative to where it’s going (so the linearity is gone, but it jiggles a lot, so I might linear interpolate it)”, – Simon explains. You can play with the improved version here: https://repl.it/@simontiger/Raycasting-AI-Improved
Finally, Simon is currently working on a version that combines all the three versions: the original, the improved and the version with relative directions (work in progress): https://repl.it/@simontiger/Raytracing-AI-Full
“I am eventually going to make a version of this using TensorFlow.js because with the toy library I’m using now it’s surprisingly linear. I’m going to put more hidden layers in the network”.
The raytracing part of the code largely comes from Daniel Shiffman.
Simon’s two other videos about this project, that was fully completed in one day:
Geeks out of the box 