CSE447 Project Solved

The year is 2041.  As a result of many years of peace and cooperation, the international community has invested in a massive expansion of the International Space Station.  On a given day, hundreds of people are in orbit.  Sophisticated tools have been developed to enable high speed, private communication among individuals, and also between the station and Earth.  You have been hired to create a system that will allow astronauts to send natural language messages without talking, using advanced eye-tracking hardware.  (The interface for presenting incoming messages to the astronaut is not your responsibility)

 

The system works by supporting, at each time step, the astronaut’s choice of the next character in the message sequence.  The system displays three Unicode characters in the astronaut’s visual field; they select one, or, if the next character they need is not among the three, use a more complicated (and slow) secondary procedure to choose another option.  Naturally, communication will be faster (and require less work on the part of the astronaut) if the system can accurately predict the next character of the intended message and place it among the top three.  (The implementation of the secondary selection procedure is not your responsibility.)

 

Overall, your system’s goal is to save astronaut time.  There are two parts to this goal, which may be in opposition to each other.  You should aim to minimize:

●     Processing time:  after the astronaut chooses the i​​th character, your system should choose the top three candidates for the (i ​ ​+ 1)th character as quickly as it can.

●     Error:  as often as possible, the astronaut’s next choice should be among the three candidates.  We will count the fraction of times it is not​ ​ in the top three and refer to it as the error rate.

 

In the simulation test at the end of the quarter, we will measure both the processing speed and accuracy of your system on real data sent by real simulated astronauts.

 

Additional notes:

1.       The astronaut will speak at least one human language, but you don’t know which one(s).  The secondary selection procedure allows the astronaut to choose any Unicode character; you can imagine that the cost of navigating through it will be very high.  The decision of which Unicode characters to allow to be possible candidates is up to you; if you are too restricted, your system might have more errors on messages in some languages.  If you try to allow all Unicode characters at every time step, your processing time might suffer.

2.       The specification for your program is quite simple, alternating between two steps:

○ At the start of an iteration (including the beginning of execution), your program outputs three characters, representing a prediction that the astronaut will choose one of them.

○ The program waits until the astronaut enters the next character of their message, which will arrive on standard input.  For the purposes of measuring processing time, the clock starts when this character is entered and stops when the three characters arrive.

3.       How you build your system is entirely up to you.  You are free to use any resources (code or data) that are available to you.  Obviously, you must not violate any laws or terms of service.

4.       The project is meant to be completed by teams of three people.