Banzai Buddy

Inspiration

Banzai Buddy was inspired by the professor who first got me into programming as a freshman. Inspiring people and pushing them to greater heights was his forte. I wanted to make a project that could also uplift people when they were feeling down. Since this professor loved linguistics I felt it appropriate to venture into NLP for the project.

What it does

Banzai Buddy takes in a prompt from the user and uses cosine similarity to match keywords in the prompt to similar words from a quotation database.

How we built it

I built the front end of the program using pygame for the central gameplay loop. The back end used sklearn for the cosine similarity analysis. Pygame does not support text wrapping natively so I used a function that was posted on the official wiki. I also used chat GPT to generate quotes. The sprites were drawn on a Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and edited in Krita. Obsidian was used to keep track of notes

Challenges we ran into

I have no background in pygame or data science. I had to do a lot of research in order to find a method of returning an appropriate quote that was easy enough for me to learn in the span of a hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm extremely proud of the dragon graphic. I'm also very proud of managing a project that required me to adopt so many new skills in such a short time frame.

What we learned

I learned about natural language processing and how statistical weighting can be used to identify similar pieces of text.

What's next for Banzai Buddy

In the future I would love to make this with more complicated NLP algorithms and port the front end to a stack with better portability.

Built With

• krita
• pygame
• python
• sklearn