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AurOracle

This is a course selection utility for Aurora. Tell it the courses you want to take, and it tells you the ways you can take them.

It generates course schedules that are free from time conflicts and that include courses you must take and courses you would take. It also attempts to determine which schedules are best and sort them accordingly.

I made this because I was sick of spending large amounts of time trying out potential combinations of sections of courses, only to encounter another conflict and be forced to move everything around.

NOTE: Schedules generated from this utility are no longer outputted to the command prompt, but rather directly to a text file. Generation can perform much faster when not printing every iteration.

How it works

Give the utility the following:

  • The term you wish to generate schedules for.
  • The list of courses you are taking for sure.
  • Optional: The number of courses you want to take and the courses you would take to fill those remaining slots.

It will then generate potential course schedules, detailing which sections to take.

By default, it will attempt to "compress" schedules, reducing potential for courses hours apart. Other optimizations can be performed, such as preferring class-free days.

You can also limit a course to specific sections by including them in the course name (MATH-1500-A01-A02)

Usage

Using the Wizard

This utility now has a wizard. If you have never used a command-line utility before or are otherwise confused, you probably want to use it. To use it, follow the install steps and just double-click the auroracle.py file.

Using the command-line

Example

auroracle.py --term fall15 --must COMP-1010 MATH-1500 GEOL-1420-A01 FREN-1152 --earliest "9:30 AM" --latest "3:30 PM"

Arguments

--number      Number of courses you are taking. Only required if the --would option is used.
--term        The term in which you are taking them. (ex. fall15, winter16, summer16, fall16)
--must        A list of courses you must take. Obviously shouldn't be larger than --number value.
--would       A list of courses you would take as electives to fill the remaining spots (optional)
--earliest    The earliest time you could stand being in class at. (Format: "10:00 PM") (optional)
--latest      The latest time you could stand being in class at.   (Format: "10:00 PM") (optional)

For course names you need to use a dash, such as MATH-1500, or quotes, such as "MATH 1500"

Advanced arguments

--offline     If this argument is provided, offline mode is enabled. The utility will then only grab data from aptly named HTML pages downloaded to the /cache directory. (ex: "MATH-1500.html")
--file        Custom filename for the output file. (optional)
--cap         Caps the generation count. If the utility is taking over 10 minutes, you may want to set the cap to 100K-200K.
--xclude      A list of course sections you can't take. Format: COMP-1010-A01

Optimization options

--prefer-free-days      Lists schedules offering the most class-free days first, if any exist.
--no-compression        Do not sort schedules by least-time-between-courses.

An example of input and output can be seen in the example-output.txt file.

Installation

This utility uses Python 2.7.

Install steps

  • Download and run the Python 2.7 installer found here.
  • Download a zip file of the utility from here
  • Unzip to a directory.
  • If you want to use the wizard: Simply double click the file auroracle.py.
  • If you want to use the CLI: Open a command line in that directory, and run auroracle.py followed by the arguments you want.

Benchmarking

Some combinations of courses yield more potential schedules than others. The following are benchmarks of the time it took the utility to generate a large amount of schedules (297590).

auroracle.py -n 3 -t fall15 -m COMP-1010 MATH-1300 ARTS-1110

x64 HP Pavillion laptop, 8GB RAM, 1.60 GHz (AMD a8-455M APU)
Generation:   214s
Optimization:  93s
Writing:      142s
TOTAL:        449s

x64 desktop, 8GB RAM, 3.20 GHz (AMD Phenom II X6 1090T)
Generation:    56s
Optimization:  27s
Writing:       38s
TOTAL:        121s

output file size: 356KB

Disclaimer

Aurora/the university may or may not care about light web scraping from students. I have yet to hear back. As it stands now, I take no responsibility if you get into trouble using this utility.

Also note that because of the large amounts of time between when course schedules are typically made, the HTML structure on Aurora could potentially change, and this utility might break as a result. Please feel free to email me at any time if the utility isn't working (sam@shelt.ca), or even submit a fix via a pull request.

TODO

  • Implement a cannot-attend-on-these-days feature.
  • Have the script recognize when classes are full.
  • More user error handling
  • Some departments (such as math) limit which lab you can take with which lecture section.
  • Verify that course sections with multiple entries in meeting times (such as CS) are handled correctly
  • Verify that other things in meeting times (such as finals) are handled correctly