Post Mortem of week 7 Pix2Pix project

For the past two weeks, I have been working on a project in my coding class. This project required me and my team to use our creativity and intelligence in order to construct a game using machine learning, specifically, we used the program Pix2Pix which unbeknownst to us was impossible to use. This is partially because of the complexity of the adversarial network that we were trying to use, but the many of the problems that we faced were caused by the restrictions of the school network in the ways of accessing images and tutorials.

This however was a learning experience for my team as we learned that pictures of Kirby (a Nintendo character that we were using for the project as the main objective of the game was to draw Kirby to the best of the players ability) are in low supply (at least when the internet is heavily censored) and if we ever need a bunch of pictures of something again that we should choose something more general to make the basis of our project. We learned that in general, it is a good idea to start doing something in a more generalized way so that more material is available.

Most of the pictures that we did find were either not usable or had to be resized to fit the parameters of the Pix2Pix program and lots of pictures after being resized were not proportional and thus unusable.

It was however very interesting on the coding side at first we focused on trying to get Pix2Pix to work but after we were told we only had one class period left we decided to focus on the design of the website where the game was to be housed. This went by fairly smoothly and we learned that if we were stumped we could have a short discussion and break and the problem would be resolved shortly. We tried to apply this strategy for the Pix2Pix but alas we too late when we started making the most progress we were out of time. But we also hit roadblocks in the program that couldn’t be resolved so we skipped those because they were basically impossible.

In the end, the project was useful in our development of team working skills as we learned how to delegate tasks between each other. We also learned to be more general when starting a project so that we can have access to more material.