If I’m going to start writing about AI, I figure I should give some backstory first on my life in AI.

My first introduction to AI was probably when I was 9 years old and snuck downstairs to watch the first Matrix movie that I wasn’t supposed to be watching. This did a great deal to feed what has become an AI obsession over the years.

In high school, after I had been programming on my own for a while with only stack overflow to guide me (plus a couple people who volunteered to help me with my shareware), I started pondering about AI from the perspective of how it worked.

I was completely perplexed, so I did what I had always done to figure out the things that puzzled me. I tried to reproduce it. When I was a freshman in college, I came up with something I thought would work. It was based around a pool of logic gates connected in a manor that evolves with a genetic algorithm. It was cool, but I wasn’t really sure how to test it or what to do with it, so I tabled it and continued to pursue my computer science degree with the goal of getting my masters in AI.

When I learned about Conway’s game of life, I became obsessed with the elegant simplicity combined with a perfect analogy for the nature of the physical world. I finally had something to use AI for. I would use it to better simulate the game of life as an analogy for using AI to understand physics. It all seemed like a far away pipe dream, but I would bide my time, learn and improve my skills until I was capable of executing on it.