Secondary Protein Structure Prediction Using Neural Networks

In this paper we experiment with using neural network structures to predict a protein's secondary structure ({\alpha} helix positions) from only its primary structure (amino acid sequence). We implement a fully connected neural network (FCNN) and preform three experiments using that FCNN. Firstly, we do a cross-species comparison of models trained and tested on mouse and human datasets. Secondly, we test the impact of varying the length of protein sequence we input into the model. Thirdly, we compare custom error functions designed to focus on the center of the input window. At the end of paper we propose a alternative, recurrent neural network model which can be applied to the problem.

Solving Royal Game of Ur Using Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning has recently surfaced as a very powerful tool to solve complex problems in the domain of board games, wherein an agent is generally required to learn complex strategies and moves based on its own experiences and rewards received. While RL has outperformed existing state-of-the-art methods used for playing simple video games and popular board games, it is yet to demonstrate its capability on ancient games. Here, we solve one such problem, where we train our agents using different methods namely Monte Carlo, Qlearning and Expected Sarsa to learn optimal policy to play the strategic Royal Game of Ur. The state space for our game is complex and large, but our agents show promising results at playing the game and learning important strategic moves. Although it is hard to conclude that when trained with limited resources which algorithm performs better overall, but Expected Sarsa shows promising results when it comes to fastest learning.