Ian Reichard's personal site

SDSU's AI club ran its first hackathon competition in the Spring of 2021 during a 2 week period. This was in the middle of the semester and I was busy with classwork, but I decided to take some time to submit my own project. We would be given a prompt and have 2 weeks to build a project to fit that prompt. At the end we would give a presentation and judges would judge us based on the quality of project and its relationship to the prompt.

Prompt

The prompt for this hackathon was "Write an AI that makes your life easier". I thought this was actually a difficult prompt, not just because of its open-ended nature but because I wasn't sure what I could come up with in a 2 week hackathon I was doing only in my free time. As a result I had to spend a while just thinking about the prompt. During one of these days I had the need to pick up an SSD for my computer. I checked r/buildapcsales on reddit and sorted by flair for SSD but couldn't find any good deals. This was my "aha!" moment where I realized what my project would do: parse r/buildapcsales and try to find good deals on PC parts. I would end up naming this project "SAVR", which is an acronym for "Savings Ai Viewing Reddit".

Development

I had to pick an API to parse reddit and ended up settling for PRAW for python. This provided an easy way to get post content on reddit with upvote count and upvote/downvote ratios (how popular it is). From getting the API working I then wrote a frontend in the form of a GUI. I hadn't started using the tkinter framework yet, and I ended up using pygame again from the Pokemon Stadium AI. The final component was the AI itself, which looked at the upvotes and timelineness of the post. A highly upvoted post posted more recently was given the highest score.

Results

The GUI frontend looked pretty decent at the end of the project, however the link buttons were cut off on the right side. A nice feature I was able to add in was clicking a button to copy its link to clipboard.

After the presentations, I was awarded first place for my efforts and won a gift card. There were other interesting submissions that used AI in their solutions, but mine was the best for solving a real, practical problem that I had in my life. After the presentation, I actually used my winnings with the program I wrote to get a sale on the SSD which spawned the idea for the project in the first place, bringing it full circle.

Conclusions

I was satisfied with my results and winning the hackathon at the end of the day. This was a pretty open ended project compared to other things I worked on at my time in university, so I was glad my problem solving an open ended prompt was able to work out well. This ended up being my only major solo project outside of classwork in college, which I am totally content with.