User:Dzhang2680/enes100/poppit

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This is my Poppit project in Intro to Engineering class.

Instructor assigned the project
The first project we had was Chunk Poppit. The whole class did the same project but we were randomly split into different groups with three people one group. Poppit is a game on Pogo.com. The goal for us was trying to pop up as many balloons as possible and see if it is mathematically possible to pop up all the balloons. We had two weeks to explore it.

Write problem statement
In order to find out a way to pop up as many balloons as possible, I came up several problem statements. Do the amount of different color balloons affect the result? Does it matter that which way I start popping up the balloons? Is there any methods in Math and Statistics that I can use to calculate it? Can I just pop up all the balloons using logical thinking?

Assign Task1
According to the problem statement, I am going to record how many balloons for each color when I start and end the game and I will try to test it starting from the left side, the right side and the bottom.

Compare actual work done to Task1
I tested each possibilities but the result wasn't too good. I couldn't find a pattern to find a better way to get less balloons left.

Week1 Narrative
I tested each possibilities. I counted the amount of different color balloons at the beginning of each game. I played starting from the bottom first and counted how many balloons left at the end. And then I played starting from the left side and the right side. From the data, I couldn't find the relationship between the amount of different color balloons at the beginning and at the end. And the amount for each color balloons at the beginning doesn't have much different. They are all around 20 to 30 balloons for each color. Also, the test showed that doing from the bottom had less balloons left than doing from the left or the right. However, I would still have at least 15 to 30 balloons left doing from the bottom. It seems like simply popping from one direction didn't work.

Then I tried to play it basing on my logical thinking. I would start from the lower level. For instance, if I saw there was one red balloon by itself on top and there were some grouped red balloons at the bottom, I won't pop the grouped red balloons. I would wait for the group raise up and group up the single red balloon. When I tried to pop up the balloons in the middle, I would look at the lower levels, trying to pop the balloons which were grouped horizontally first because once I pop the balloons in the middle, the following balloons would raise which might cost horizontal grouped balloons seperate.

The best result I can get from playing it basing on logical thinking was 4 left and 2 left.

Week1 Peer Review
Go to each team mates weekly summary wiki page. Read their activities and narrative. Then go the associated discussion page. Say something positive on this page. Try some constructive criticism. Add your name and 1sfoerster 13:32, 28 August 2011 (UTC) to create a time and date stamp. Create a new category if another team mate has already commented here.

Assign Task2
I will get one of my friends to help me with playing Poppit. Her name is Lorita Yau, who is an expert at playing online video games. Try to see if she will have some breakthrough. At the same time, I will talk to Professor Lang, who is brilliant at math, to help me with the math part.

Compare actual work done to Task2
The result was better than I expected. Lorita Yau got all the balloons popped. Professor Lang gave me some useful ideas.

Week2 Narrative
I got Professor Lang and one of my friends, Lorita Yau, to help me with the project.

I talked to Professor Lang about Poppit. He showed great interest in it and gave me some advices. He said,"You might analyze the colors in the top row and compare with colors in rows below to see what balloons you will need to have when they rise to the top. This could be done by doing a row-by-row comparison of colors to look for any patterns and what colors appear in which columns in each row.  Analyze column-by-column to see what colors appear in each column.  Perhaps some sort of correlation analysis, either one-dimensional or two-dimensional would help.  You might apply the concept of shifts in a way similar to what you do with the graphs of functions." This suggestion is also about counting the color balloons. However, it had more details. That might be the reason why I couldn't find a relationship by counting colors before, because the method I used was too general. This might narrow down the possibilities. And the graph shifting model part was very interesting too. I need to do more research to actually put it to practical. Since we don't have enough time to do the project, I haven't figure out a good way to test it yet. So we didn't do it but it is a good direction to go if we want to continue it in the future.

Lorita Yau told me she played the game for three days, about 5 or 6 hours everyday, she finally got all the balloons popped. The pictures on the right are the proves. I saw how she did it. Basically, we had the same concept. She tried to get all the single color balloons grouped up. And she followed the rules I mentioned in the week 0 activities. The only difference was she was really patient and spent a lot of time to play one game. She tried to be really thoughtful from step to step and she undo the steps once she messed up. I don't know if undoing steps is agaist the rules, but it proved that it is possible to pop up all the balloons. It just required a lot of thinking and energy. It was a breakthrough for our team.

Week2 Peer Review
Go to each team mates weekly summary wiki page. Read their activities and narrative. Then go the associated discussion page. Say something positive on this page. Try some constructive criticism. Add your name and 1sfoerster 13:32, 28 August 2011 (UTC) to create a time and date stamp. Create a new category if another team mate has already commented here.

Complete Project Page
Team project page ::jdjengineers

Start Next Project Week0 activities
The next project is Spaghetti Bridge.