User:Rsb27

My name is Raul Buelvas (Pronounced Ra-ool, Boo-el-vas), I live in Savannah, Georgia, and I am currently a freshman in the Pratt School of Engineering!

My favorite demo in the Matlab built-in help demonstrations is probably the one relating to the traveling salesman. I have never heard of the problem of the traveling salesman before, but I was intrigued by the idea of it. What interested me most, however, was what the code looks like for the program. I am curious what method the programmer used to figure out the shortest distance. Obviously he wants the perimeter of the shape generated by the plots to be at its minimum value, but I have no idea how he actually did that.

I also was interested by the Minesweeper demo. I never knew that whole games could be programmed into Matlab. I have a few guesses as to the basic idea of the program, but I dont know what specifically would be programmed to get a game like that. My guess is that each cell is a matrix, and the board is a much larger matrix. I think the program figures out the placement of the mines, and somehow the matrices communicate with each other to determine what numbers appear when the cells are clicked. Beyond that, I am pretty much lost.

I found this article to be very interesting because engineering the brain is what initially got me interested in the field of engineering. I never realized that such a seemingly small task could require so much time, effort, money, or physical space even. [1], Sally Adee, IEEE Spectrum, updated June 2008, accessed 19 September 2011