ideas.md

list of programming project ideas

Board games

Any two player board game is a good exercise for basic programming logic, and you can make it into a console application. Checkers, Connect-4, Othello, Poker, Go, whatever. Chess is somewhat harder than those other games.

Here are some ways to extend these projects:

• Add the ability to save and load games
• Add an AI
• Allow players to play over a local network.
• Build these as front-end or mobile applications.
• Make this into a web app--build a website which lets people play the game online. You can extend this arbitrarily far: nice GUIs, realtime play, etc.

Math

One really fun project is to build a computer algebra system, which is a library which lets you do symbolic manipulation. It should be able to represent expressions like $latex x + 2y$. It should know that $latex 2(x + y) = 2x + 2y$. This turns out to be pretty tricky, and making it work is a great learning experience.

Another project I enjoyed when I was younger was writing a circuit simulator. You gave the program a graph of circuit components, and it turned the graph into a system of linear equations, then solved them for current.

others

• Algorithms
  • Classics. Sorting algorithms, searching algorithms.
  • Binary search trees. Insert, delete. Treaps. 2-3-4 trees.
    • OSTs
  • String algorithms
  • AIs for video games
• Front end
  • Games
  • Graphing library
  • Rich text editor
  • Excel clone
• CS
  • Regular expression matcher
  • Interpreter
  • Compiler
• Web
  • HTTP server
  • Web scraper
  • ORM
  • Web app framework
• Low level
  • Image conversion utilities