CSC-SY

As usuall we have this semester project what are your ideas? and what are you planning to do?
Our Department Manager, Dr.Naser, suggested two projects:
1- An application for transferring data over GSM networks.
2- Arabic spelling and grammar checker.
And frankly I'm a little bit confused though I have a lot of ideas, what about you?

Well, to me it's always a partners problem more than an ideas problem.
So is there a group in Damascus Uni. needs an extra student.

You're 100% right, I faced the same problem all the time (hence I decided this year to take it on my own).
After an extensive research yesterday, I decided to make analysis and simulation on Ant Colony Algorithm, luckily, the supervisor accepted to make this study alone!

Well, I'm doing the compiler project alone and I have a 6 hours a day job, so I don't want to do this too on my own
Anyway... probably no one here would be interested in a project partner, so I don't know if I have a chance.

This ant colony algorithm thing seems like an excellent idea for a one-man project: it's is new, and there are code examples linked to from the wikipedia page in several languages, and the size looks appropriate too, overall an excellent choice. Please make a point of publishing the source code, so that when fellow loners get to the same point they'll have more material to work from.

You're right about that, but it's time-consuming! specially when talking about visualizing it and perhaps make it multi-threaded too!

Ofcorse, I'll try to upload it when I'm finished.

Now, I have a question, does anyone knows a simple algorithm for visualizing a graph? pseudo code maybe or one-two steps for doing such thing?
Please don't link me to some of-the-shelf tools, I need a written algorithm that I can read and use easily.
Any ideas?

Honestly I don't think it's a good idea to implement your own graph visualization library while your project is not about visualization, this could prove to require a lot of effort and time, a lot more than the main part of the project.
I think it's better to use an external library, just like when using external libraries for GUI.
I've just googled "visualizing a graph" and found a lot of interesting stuff most notably Grappa a Java Graph Package.
I really think that you should concentrate on your project main point instead of spending time on off-topic stuff.

You're right, adding visualization takes a lot of time, and we should forget about benchmarking the algorithm for example if it's loaded with heavy visualization computation for example, the problem is that my supervisor insisted on visualization as the main part of the program, I'll try to convince him to drop it and focus on ACO itself.
Using a third-party library to visualize the resulting graph ... good idea, but it's not exactly what I need because of many reasons:
- I want to draw customized graph for step-by-step execution of the algorithm showing what's changing and how to diverge towards optimal solutions for example, and most of the libraries I've seen just plots the given graph (hence I wanted to read the algorithm for doing such thing so I can control the visualization process).
- I'm using Qt toolkit for making the UI of the program, and only few libraries are supported here.
Perhaps you're right, and I'll try to drop (or let's say postpone) this idea and focus on implementing the algorithm correctly.

Thanks foaad.

BTW, What did you decide to do for your semester project?

Well, There was a couple of projects left on the suggested projects paper, I picked up the easiest one (CASE tool for class diagrams) I'm supposed to do this project with two 5th year students and another 4th year student (whom I haven't met yet) joined us lately.
I think I'll do the implementation after the final exams (in a couple of days using .NET) and leave the rest for the others.