An Internet Portal based on 'Twenty Questions'

An efficient Internet portal should contain a search engine or maybe even a decision support system to supply the user with the information (s)he may be looking for. In this report an intelligent agent is suggested that relates different sites to each other, based on the answers supplied by the users looking for certain information. For this purpose a self-learning system has been made, based on the neural network of the game Twenty Questions, but with a strategy that relates different objects or sites by correlating the list of answers to the questions

'Mud-cracking' in a Latex paint film

Thicker coatings of paint made up of water, polymer latex, titanium dioxide pigment and with no organic solvents, exhibit mud-cracking when they dry. This is due to a build up of stress in the drying film. There is a need to develop a theory of mud mechanics which shows the role of the pigment volume concentration in the paint thickness and the latex viscosity in developing stress in the film. The aim is to reduce the build up of stress in the drying film to avoid crack initiation