Update

Since I had finished the literature review section, I had pulled together all that I had done on the dissertation so far and loosely arranged it into how it will appear in the final document. I then emailed it to my technical supervisor so that he could take a read over it so that I could have some feedback on it. I was slightly worried about the size of my literature review as it is around 6500 words alone, when the introduction, RQ, and motivation sections were added in, it came out at around 8300.

The feedback I got from the meeting was actually rather good. As it turns out my supervisor had expected this the size of my dissertation to be rather large simply because I have alot to write about. The size is going to stay the same for the time being so that I can weigh it up against the rest of the dissertation (if it turns out it is huge compared to the rest of it, then it will be cut down). 

As it turns out there were very few problems with what I had written so far, most of the things that were suggested to me was simply to reword a few senteces and then find the diagrams for the literature review section.

As for the practical side, I had a talk with my supervisor about the best way to implement the Fuzzy State Machine for the vegetation. As it stands, the FuSM can only accept one crisp input. I had been trying to use the rate at which the vegetation was increasing/decreasing as this input but with little success. We both agreed that it would probably be better if i could somehow base this input on several factors. In the end we decieded that three factors should influence the input to the FuSM: these would be the rate at which it is being eaten, the remaining herbivore population and the remaining water levels.

In order to base the input off three seperate values, a Fuzzy Inference System will be used. This would allow be to take into consideration the three input values and return a single crisp value which could then be used as input for the FuSM.

One other thing that did come out of this meeting was that allow the FuSM seems like a good idea, it may be overkill. By overkill I mean, it may be trying to be too realistic with out actually making much of a difference as it may turn out that its implemtation does not actually have a visible effect on the system. Therefore, it was decieded that it will only be applied to a handfull of vegetation as a test, if it goes well and does indeed make a difference, then it will be applied to all the vegetation.

progress

I have managed to finish the literature review section now. It still needs to be read over as there are a few sections within it that I will need to revisit and reword. I also still have to scan in a few diagrams and tables to help illustrate some of the points that have been made within this section.

Not much progress has been made on the application, seem to have hit a bit of a motivational slump with it. Some minor tweaks have been made, some of the code has been clean up and commented. The next major task in the Honours project is to implement the fuzzy state machine for the vegetation. The Fuzzy State Machine had been created near the start of the term (as I had been working on one over the winter break) . However, a lot of though needs to go into how this will actually be implemented within the application as I do not believe it will be a simple task.

Practical work and Dissertation

Work on my dissertation has continued. The Literature review section is coming along very well and should hopefully be finished soon. I have written down some thoughts on how to go about writing the Methodology section of the dissertation aswell. 

The MADTFDA is almost fully in-place. Several of the functions can now influence the application and its inhabitants. As an example of this, the function that checks for low herbivore populations and high resource amounts is able to alter the herbivores perception range (among other things) to allow them to spot food more easily etc.

Dissertation and application

I've been continuing to work on the first draft of my dissertation. I've managed to get a very large chunk of the Literature review out of the way and have finished a new introduction which is a combination of the proposal introducting, plus more up to date and more relevant information.

Hopefully I will have the first draft of the introduction and literature review finished by a week tomorrow (which will be the 26th Feb)

AS for the application, I now have acceptable boundaries within the MADTFDA. I am able to check if the data fed into the graphs is under specific thresholds (such as high population but low resources or vice versa) and also to get the threshold with the highest priority returned.

Next on the list is to actually make the manager start to alter variables to help restore the system. To do this, the variables with the largest impact will have to be found. Once this has been set up for the herbivore population, it can then be applied to the carnivores and after that the omnivores.

Further enhancements to the flocking algorithm and environment code will also have to be made, such as over grazing on areas of vegetation causing it to take longer to grow back

Practical Work and Dissertation

Started writing up my dissertation. written about 1250 words of the literature review which just now covers background reading on A-Life, fuzzy logic and eco-systems. Made a start at the previous work part as well.

On the application side, getting close to finishing enough to have a very basic model up and running. The herbivores successfully flock around the environment, avoiding obstacles. WHen they are hungry, they move over to vegetation to eat. When the vegetation drops too low, the system manager starts to grow more. Need to add in water resources and allow the manager access to the herbivores need to breed, average life expectancy and hunger rate to help control the flow. 

Practical work

Been working on combining the basic flocking model with the MADTFDA and fusm. Found a few problems with the boid and flock class feeding wrong information into the MADTFDa classes, but I think I have fixed that problem now. Will continue to combine the techniques to create the first iteration of teh basic system

Practical Work

Stopped working on my basic flocking.

Started coding the Multi-Axial Dynamic Threshold Fuzzy Decision Algorithm.

Once a basic one of these is up and running, I will need to plan out some graphs