a project
 

I can never come up with a project worth doing. Any ideas? Full blown applications mostly, I dont like doing web apps.

What programming language(s) do you know / are interested in working on? I can think of several off the top of my head:

A library program - I have a ton of books and never know what bookshelf (or what shelf on that bookshelf) they go - and a few times I've bought duplicate books because I forget I have a certain title. You could enter in information about the book (title, author, ISBN, summary, etc.) and make it searchable. If you don't have a need for doing this for books, how about CDs? Movies? MP3s? Plenty of uses for a library program.

Calendar program - the ability to display the current month (or few months) and store events, have reminders a few days in advance of items (i.e.: "hey, the girlfriend's birthday is coming up soon, don't forget to buy flowers and jewelry"), and categorize events (i.e.: display all events having to do with homework assignments, or all birthdays, etc.).

head on over to sourceforge and check the help wanted.

or if you like an open source app (firefox for instance, or open office) contact them and see if they have anything you are interested in. you'll probably get some tedious bitch work to start off, but hey, every chef was a dishwasher once.

I dont own enough to justify a library program. And bitch work is a little below me, (not trying to sound concieted). The library program would be easy with an XML schema, a datagrid object, and a database.

I would like to do an engineering program..I should probably just find something that is not good and make a better version.

You want a hard problem that's not below you? How about writing a program can that generate sensical poetry without using a sample of chopped poems, but only a large vocabulary. Even more so, have it generate original poetry based on input of a short number of subject keywords.

Also, give it a plugin structure so that someone can write a haiku plugin, sonnet plugin, etc. What you need to do incorporate all of the grammatical rules of the English language.

Well, the point is to brainstorm a ton of ideas and see if one of them is worth considering. How about the calendar idea? What kind of engineering program would you want to do?

Design an AI capable of making moral decisions and judgements based on inferences about its surroundings and the perceived effects on humans.

Create an alogrithm to solve a P-NP algorithm in tractable time -- there's a 7 million dollar prize for anyone who can (and probably a Turing award)..

http://www.claymath.org/millennium/

I doubt those problems are below you.

I wrote a perl spider to find & feed business news story headlines from the internet into a genetic/evolution AI population with the health function being profit made on the stock market. I wrote another perl script that connected to an online stock market game (@investopedia.com) and placed the orders that the healthiest member of the population came up with.

It didnt quite work. Was always about even on the buy/sell, I was hoping for 1% growth a day.

Money = (initial investment)*(1+.01)^days
So, for $2000 initial investment after 300 business days
Money = ($2000)*(1+.01)^300 = $39,577
After 600 business daya
Money = $783,167
After 900 Business days
Money = $15,497,670


I had one function that searched headlines for businesses (so the AI knew what stock to buy/sell). Each member of the population had different values for differnt words (this is what was evolved), so the headline was parsed by adding up the values of thwe words. Then the AI either buy if positve, or sold if negative. Held for a day then rectifed the transaction.

I think my problem was in using individual words and not considering phrases. I think Im going to rewrite it for the FOREX since the FORX is open almost 24-7.