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Home > News > Collision-free Cal Band
Cal Band marching through campus

Collision-free Cal Band

Fall 2016 Berkeley Engineer magazine cover
November 1, 2016
This article appeared in Berkeley Engineer magazine, Fall 2016
  • In this issue

    Features

    Seeing is believing

    Dynamic duo

    New nukes

    Dean’s word

    Upfront

    • Raising rad awareness
    • Nobel (bike) parking
    • Collision-free Cal Band
    • “Who is the Michael Jordan of computer science?”
    • Eco-friendly tiny house
    • Materials database speeds innovation
    • Q+A on homebrewed drugs with John Dueber
    • New home for Fung Institute

    Breakthroughs

    • Next-gen batteries
    • Neural dust
    • Green cities
    • Concrete thinking
    • Brand new glue

    Alumni notes

    • Following the New Sun Road
    • 2 professors among the “7 over 70”
    • 7 Berkeley engineers among 35 top innovators under 35
    • Farewell

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Last spring, Tina Chow, professor of civil and environmental engineering, was looking for a real-world problem for her 400 students to solve as a final project for E7, an introductory computer programming  class for engineering undergraduates.

She found out the University of California Marching Band needed help developing a computer code to program transitions for their field routines — the band’s search for a good algorithm kept coming up short, and crafting formations by hand takes hours. “We encouraged the students to brainstorm and watch videos of the band. We asked why a human can plan the transitions and why a computer couldn’t,” Chow says. “We didn’t know what the solution would be when we assigned the project.”

Working in teams of twos and threes, several groups managed to develop efficient computational choreography. Some of the groups used the Hungarian algorithm, developed in the 1950s for economically assigning workers to tasks. “The elegance was in how they systematically went through the transitions and eliminated collisions,” Chow says of the student projects. “They kept fixing the movements until there were zero collisions.”

“We worried it was going to be too hard,” Chow says. “But the band did have a real problem to solve.” And the E7 students were able to solve it.

Read the full story and watch the algorithm in action. 

Topics: Computing, Students
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