My 25-year adventure in AI and ML
I never intended to work with AI or ML. It more so happened along the way naturally from using whatever tools I needed for the task, and eventually it took over. I didn't even realize it at the time.
Given that it is New Year's Eve, it seems appropriate to look back on my career to see how I got here. Let's go back to the year 2000 and walk through the major AI/ML projects I worked on.
I've talked about how I got into programming before: Learning HTML was too hard so I made a compiler instead. But along the way, I also tried to make video games (like any kid).
The best I came up with was a timer that triggers some effect every X seconds plus some conditionals. Increase pet's hunger every 10 seconds. Decrement health every 3 seconds if hunger level is greater than 5. Faint if health reaches 0.
Fast forward to high school. The biggest game I made at the time without giving up was a 2d space shooter where you defended yourself against waves of enemies while collecting simple powerups. A pretty standard exercise for a wanna-be game developer. For this, I hard coded a long, long sequence of if statements that used random numbers, how long you've been playing, how many shots you have fired, your hp, etc. to determine which wave of enemies to send out next. Finally, it felt dynamic and not entirely predictable. It was even almost fun. But no one would play it more than a few minutes. (Unfortunately, I can't find any screenshots from this era.)
