Agent Smith helps sixth form students enter The Matrix

Wednesday 11 July 2007

The day allowed the students to explore intelligent agents, as seen in The Matrix, looking at algorithms for an agent to perform tasks autonomously. Throughout the day, the students were asked to perform a number of tasks, such as come up with their ideal intelligent agent, present information about different search algorithms, culminating with them coding part of an agent in Java before competing their group's agent in a race against other groups. The day finished with prizes for the group with the fastest agent, with all students going away with a video of their presentations on a memory stick.

As part of the Science and Engineering Summer School, the event was aimed at promoting awareness of Computer Science and raising aspirations for students to go to university. Feedback on the event was very encouraging with the result that all 14 would now consider studying Computing at University, compared to just 4 before the session, summed up by the comment "it was a very good course, I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to study Computer Science at university."

The day is to be repeated on the 12th July for a group of students from The College of Richard Collyer.

Further information on outreach events can be found here.