Dear all,
As described in class yesterday, we ask you to form teams or 3 or less people for the project. Please send us back an email until next week with the list of people in your team, and more importantly, a team name!
As a quick summary:
The first phase of the project is to use the Metropolis algorithm to solve the N-queens problem (here is the wikipedia page about this problem). You have to think first what state space to choose, what objective function, what base chain, what acceptance probabilities...
In the second phase of the project, we will ask you to estimate the number of solutions via techniques involving again the Metropolis algorithm. We will send you a detailed description of this in the coming weeks.
The third phase will be the project competition, taking place on Thursday, December 22, at 12:15 PM (the date Dec 23 on Moodle was wrong, due to a copy-paste of last year). The competition will involve a slight twist of the N-queens problem (but we don't tell you in advance which).
And we will ask you to send us, before the competition, a small report, along with your code (which needs to be a Metropolis code, as there are of course other valid methods to solve the N-queens problem, but this is not the purpose of this course). The project grade will be based mainly on this report; the competition is only a bonus.
All the best and have a nice week-end,
Olivier and the teaching team
