Self-directed learning

[Mr.Beans]

It's nearing the last quarter of my AP Computer Science class. My professor has announced to the class that will will be doing self-directed learning for the rest of the year. He said he is going to grade it on progress, not completion. This will allow me to take on something interesting that I may not be able to complete in the month I have to do it.
So far my interests are

• AI (checkers, turing challenge, etc).
• Programming languages (maybe a simple scripting language)
• Cryptography and stenography (from ceasers cypher to rsa
• Contributing to a FOSS project used commercially (for real world experience)

I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do.

Do you guys have any suggestions or ideas?

Thank you for your time and effort,

Mr. Beans

[Mr.Beans]

Note: The only stipulation so far is that I have to use java. He's going to give us the official assignment details tomorrow.

[OrangeDog]

Some kind of watermark-detecting perceptron?

[Mr.Beans]

I might give that a try as it sounds interesting.

Does anyone know of any open source projects which have a strong emphasis ai?

I've also been thinking of maybe using convex optimization to solve something, as it sounds rather interesting as well.