Author: Nicholas Chaump

Project Overview Video

In today’s society, there are many technologies that are rapidly advancing. Inventions such as self-driving cars, Google, human carrying rockets, speech recognition software, virtual assistants, and humanoid robotics are all at the forefront of technological development today. Although it may not be obvious at first, the above inventions named all have one thing in common: they all rely on artificial intelligence to work and operate in their desired manners.This paper will cover artificial intelligence’s role and place in modern society, industry, government, and military. The impact this technology has on problem solving and the short term and long term projections and capabilities will also be discussed.

• Rules of Settlers of Catan – we will carefully adapt the official rules from the game into our automated board game.
• Coin Size – the tokens to represent the resources will be built to a standard poker chip size.
• ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) Plastic – the 3D printer here works best with this standard form of printing plastic.
• 9V Battery – standard power source for electronics
• Resistors – used standard resistor values and colors
• DC Motors – will use the standard stepper and servo motors
• Voltage into Arduino will be a standard value of 5V
• Probability – we will implement a program to simulate rolling two dice with a 1/6 chance to roll any number on a six-sided die
• Size of Pieces – the game pieces will follow the precedent from the official settlers of Catan game
• Buttons – we will incorporate standard buttons to activate the automated board game.
• Switches – we will use switches to adjust the dispersion of the resources
• LEDs – use a standard 2V across each LED

1.Roll Dice

• Using an Arduino Micro Controller, each turn there will be a display of two integers (1-6) added together for a dice roll.
• In addition to displaying the dice roll, each roll will be recorded to show the probability distribution of the dice at the end of the game through micro controller data.

2. Recognize Piece Placement

• Using multiple circuit loops and resistors, one main deliverable is to be able to recognize if there is any settlement or city adjacent to the tiles on the board.
• There are 54 possible placements on the game board and if there are 5 volts going to each one with another line feeding into individual input voltage pins, the micro-controller can label each point and measure what piece is on the board

3. Dispense Cards

• One problem that this project plans to eliminate is the issue of reaching over the table to access the resource cards. There will be dispensary machine within the box of the game to dispense specific cards to individual players.

4. Record Points

• While playing the game there are different ways to score points and the first one to get 10 Victory Points wins the game. Throughout the game because the board will be able to recognize the amount of pieces you have on the board it will also display the amount of points you currently have using 2 seven segment LED’s.

5. Read Cards

• To resupply the Card Dispensary there will also be a “feedback” system atop the box of the game so that the individual resource cards can be divided into the appropriate piles. These piles will the replenish the dispensary system causing the game to continue without pause.

6. Randomize Board

• Settlers of Catan has a unique feature that allows two games to never be played on the same board.
• There are 19 Resource Tiles on the board
  • 4 – Sheep, Wood, Wheat
  • 3 – Ore, Brick
  • 1 – Desert
• There are 19 number tiles that are placed on each resource tile.

Each of these aspects of the game can be randomized to create different playing fields for each game.

7. Automated Player

• Another goal of this project is to write a program that can play as an individual in the game of “Settlers of Catan”.

8. Online Interaction

• The final goal of this project is to build a program that allows people to play the game “Settlers of Catan” over a website.

9. Game pieces with specific resistor values

• Cities, settlements, roads, and the robber will have resistor values specific to each player in order for the board to distribute cards and points, accordingly

10. Board records points automatically

• The board will keep track of the points accumulated by players based on the number of settlements / cities, victory points due to development cards, longest road and / or largest army

PROJECT

Automated Catan Project

ROLE

Create an automated dice roll software for the game and incorporate it into the project

SUPERVISOR

Dr. Spalletta

TOPIC 8

Artificial Intelligence

MOTIVATION 

This topic will delve into artificial intelligence’s place in modern society. Artificial intelligence is an up and coming discipline, reaching its fingers in industry, government, and military. This paper will measures its impact on the creativity and problem solving ability of AI.