Blog

Undergraduates are engaging in original research and developing outstanding applied computing projects across the Michigan Tech campus. These general articles highlight their amazing work.

  • College of Computing Announces Launch of Undergraduate Research Journal
    By Leo Ureel, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Cognitive and Learning Sciences The College of Computing at Michigan Technological University is pleased to announce the launch of the Infinite Loop Online Journal for Undergraduate Research and Applied Computing. This initiative reflects the college’s commitment to fostering academic excellence, intellectual rigor, and research-based learning among undergraduate …
  • Monster Hunter: Quest
    Have you ever wanted to play Monster Hunter as a Turn-Based RPG that is close to how the main games work? Monster Hunter: Quest is the first game that I have coded, and it is heavily inspired by Monster Hunter Tri and Monster Hunter: World. I created everything in it besides the music and the …
  • Sentinel Values
    “Halt!  Who goes there?”  The sentinel on duty at the castle was wide awake.  Our sentinel values don’t carry weapons or defend ramparts, but they perform useful guarding tasks in our programs.  In computer science, a sentinel value is a value that would not normally occur in input and serves as a marker of the …
  • Debugging for Beginners
    Ugh!  Bugs. They’re always crawling around and flying in your face when you least expect.  The same applied to computer science bugs. They’ve been around since 1947 with the early computers, and continue to annoy us today. The first recorded case of a bug was a moth that Grace Hopper found jamming a relay switch …
  • Shamrock Treasure Hunt
    Leapin’ Leprechauns!  It’s St. Patrick’s Day and the leprechauns still can’t find a safe place to hide their gold.  They think they’ve gotten crafty and found a better place, but this game shows they might need to try again.  Similar to minesweeper, the Shamrock Treasure Hunt displays the distance to the leprechauns’ gold when a …
  • Tic-Tac-Toe
    Want to make video games, but have limited programing skills? Then start here. We’ll explore a simple Tic-Tac-Toe that runs exclusively through your terminal or command prompt.
  • Disproof by Counter Example
    Sometimes we need to show that a claim is false. This can be done by finding a counterexample. Consider any claim of the form: . To show that the claim is false, we need to find a value of  for which  is true and  is false. That is, we need to prove the negation of the above claim: . Finding …
  • Traditional Caesar Cipher
    Julius Caesar was worried.  He needed to get a letter back to Cicero, the consul of Rome, but it had to travel through enemy territory.  His solution?  Shift every letter to the third letter after it, wrapping around so that A became D and Y became B.  Here we’ll implement his idea in a computer …
  • Files that Make You Smile
    Files.  Those floppy, large things full of paper that used to be the bane of office workers are now electronic.  No more lifting stacks of paper and having a couple of papers fall on the floor and get out of order!  Instead we have to keep even more files in order inside folders, inside other …
  • ASCII Fun
    ASCII art like the greeting above is common, but ASCII characters are useful for a lot more.  Represented in a Java in a manner identical to the first 128 unsigned integers, they can be substituted for ints at any time, and ints 32 -126 inclusive can be cast to chars and printed.  While limited compared …