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Tabletop Game Startup
Get PDFStarting a new business is a tedious and challenging process especially when it comes to an original idea for a tabletop game. The original idea for the game must be put into written rules and physical gameplay components. These aspects must be confirmed to work and collecting feedback from others is often a major tool used in this stage. From this point, a game developer can go a few different directions such as attempting to sell the game to a larger company or trying to produce their own independent game.
Keeping the game independent is arguably the more difficult route as a developer accepts the responsibility of providing the initial starting funds, marketing strategies, branding, and other challenges. The recommendations for getting started as an independent game contradicts the fundamentals of business in many other industries and can be navigated in a variety of paths of which remain at the discretion of the developer. There truly is no one way to go when starting.
In my honors project, I along with a small team, will be navigating the challenging path from an original game idea to a sellable product named Draw 3. Our game is drawing based and has proved to be enjoyed by a wide variety of age groups. Heading into the project we constructed a business plan, performed playtesting, and have established as a limited liability company and filed for trademark. The remainder of this project will consist of navigating the challenges of marketing and performing a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund an initial order of 1,500 units to be sold. Starting any business is extremely challenging, but this project will provide insight on exactly how to do that and no matter the outcome, it will also provide valuable training on entrepreneurship
Ciliate Endosymbiont Imaging Methodology
Get PDFCiliates, a phylum of diverse microbial eukaryotes, are found in a wide range of environments, including anoxia. Anaerobic ciliates host intracellular methanogenic archaea – a unique type of symbiosis. Despite their importance, anaerobic ciliates and their symbiotic relationships remain understudied. Included in this is the ability to image and quantify the intracellular methanogenic symbionts in a precise, timely and replicable procedure. This project aimed to improve the current fluorescence microscopy methodology used for endosymbiont quantification. The proposed method is intended for use with the Opera Phenix, a high throughput spinning disk confocal microscope which can count large amounts of individual cells automatically. Cells obtained from anaerobic cell cultures were fixed in paraformaldehyde, washed, and filtered before imaging. The findings of the study indicate that the method developed has potential. A challenge that remains is removing fine debris from the sample that interfere with automatic cell counting, while ensuring high ciliate concentrations that can be quantified. Once this challenge is addressed, the method developed could aid in gaining new insights into the complex relationship between ciliates and their endosymbionts
Jammed disks of two sizes and weights in a channel: Alternating sequences
Get PDFDisks of two sizes and weights in alternating sequence are confined to a long and narrow channel. The axis of the channel is horizontal and its plane vertical. The channel is closed off by pistons that freeze jammed microstates out of loose disk configurations subject to moderate pressure, gravity, and random agitations. Disk sizes and channel width are such that under jamming no disk remains loose and all disks touch one wall. We present exact results for the characterization of jammed macrostates including volume and entropy. The rigorous analysis divides the disk sequences of jammed microstates into overlapping tiles from which we construct a small number of species of statistically interacting particles. Jammed macrostates depend on dimensionless control parameters inferred from ratios between measures of expansion work against the pistons, gravitational potential energy, and intensity of random agitations. These control parameters enter the configurational statistics via the activation energies prior to jamming of the particles. The range of disk weights naturally divides into regimes where qualitatively different features come into play. We sketch a path toward generalizations that include random sequences under a modified jamming protocol
Prediction of Concrete Strengths Enabled by Missing Data Imputation and Interpretable Machine Learning
Get PDFMachine learning (ML)-based prediction of non-linear composition-strength relationship in concretes requires a large, complete, and consistent dataset. However, the availability of such datasets is limited as the datasets often suffer from incompleteness because of missing data corresponding to different input features, which makes the development of robust ML-based predictive models challenging. Besides, as the degree of complexity in these ML models increases, the interpretation of the results becomes challenging. These interpretations of results are critical towards the development of efficient materials design strategies for enhanced materials performance. To address these challenges, this paper implements different data imputation approaches for enhanced dataset completeness. The imputed dataset is leveraged to predict the compressive and tensile strength of concrete using various hyperparameter-optimized ML approaches. Among all the approaches, Extreme Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (XGBoost) showed the highest prediction efficacy when the dataset is imputed using k-nearest neighbors (kNN) with a 10-neighbor configuration. To interpret the predicted results, SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) is employed. Overall, by implementing efficient combinations of data imputation approach, machine learning, and data interpretation, this paper develops an efficient approach to evaluate the composition-strength relationship in concrete. This work, in turn, can be used as a starting point toward the design and development of various performance-enhanced and sustainable concretes
