Need ideas for A level advanced project

[Sid123]

I have been programming for just over a year now and in my final year of A Level computer science I am required to produce a solution to a problem of my choosing. The only stipulation is that the solution(in the form of a programming project) must be of sufficient complexity.
These are the guidelines:
a data-processing problem of an organisation
a scientific or mathematical problem
a simulation of a real-life situation
a computer-aided learning system
a control system / robotics.

and must contain one or more of:
Non-trivial algorithms, standard or user-defined, e.g. a graph traversal algorithm, recursive
algorithms
 Use of sophisticated features of programming language / complexity of programming
language, e.g. sophisticated data structures, runtime created objects, user-defined OOP
classes
 Time-based simulation
 Development of program solutions for portable devices / games consoles
 Complexity of non-computing field of the problem, e.g. 3-D vector manipulation
 Communication Protocols, e.g. TCP connections
 Image Processing / pattern recognition, e.g. steganography, use of regular expressions

I am by no means an advanced programmer, but would consider myself a fairly average intermediate level. Any ideas would be great-past examples have been a Sudoku solver, A mobile app for organising a tournament with results live updated and statistics stored and sorted, A stock control system(wasnt complex enough), A program that randomly generated quadratic equations and provided user feedback when they were solved, projectile motion simulator, simulation of the UK economy... etc
Ideas?? I was thinking about a plagarism checker for essays-copy and paste the plaintext and then it scours the internet for similar phrasing etc, but i would have no idea how to do that to any sort of standard

[shadowmouse]

I've just had to do the same thing and I chose a graph drawer, but if that seems a bit much, the main bit that you can get your teeth stuck into is making an equation parser, such that you can type in any expression and it tells you what it evaluates to. If you want to advance that, make it able to rearrange and/or differentiate/integrate.

[Sid123]

I've just had to do the same thing and I chose a graph drawer, but if that seems a bit much, the main bit that you can get your teeth stuck into is making an equation parser, such that you can type in any expression and it tells you what it evaluates to. If you want to advance that, make it able to rearrange and/or differentiate/integrate.

I wanted to do that, but I cant justify it as it is easily available on wolphram alpha/most scientific calculators, and I have to explain why my implementation is better/different to those that are easily available. Did you get a good mark?

[shadowmouse]

No as in, I've just had to choose something and start programming it. I've been programming it for a few months and when I asked my Computing teacher (for the record, he expects me to get an A* so he wouldn't let me do a project which isn't hard enough), he said it was a good idea and I had sent and email to OCR which contained the idea (amongst other things) and they said they were interested to see what I could do with it. If you were to make it able to do things like calculus on the equation then that isn't easily available (I don't think). I also plan on adding things like a graph wizard so you can adjust the proportions of the graph without having to manually change the equation, and something about converting a section of graph into a sound wave and playing it.

[Sid123]

Hmm its a thought! what were the other ideas in your class?

[shadowmouse]

Due to rather unique circumstances (for some reason I'm doing 4.4 A levels and starting early), I'm not actually in a class and just discussed it 1 on 1 with the Computing teacher at my school. My only other idea was an adventure game that was designed around the gimmick of being able to rotate gravity, but only by 90 degees at a time.