MLDS - Chief Technical Officer

For this competition students were tasked with creating an AI to play a modified, competitive, game of life. Each square could attack all squares within a 5*5 neighborhood, with attacked cells coming under control of the team they were attacked by. Like game of life, if cells were surrounded by too many active cells, they would die. In teams of 2-4, students would submit a script that defined their agent's actions, and team scripts were then pitted against each other in a live competitive bracket. Setting up this competition both years was a joint effort between myself and Henry Castillo, who now works at Stripe. You can take a look at some example code, and even run a match yourself, here.

Within this competition for 2020, students were asked to identify handwritten characters in noisy 20*20 images. For this competition I wanted to avoid students using off the shelf models so all characters were custom made and animated using scripts in blender. To keep word and letter frequency reasonable, characters were converted over from "To Kill a Mocking Bird", leaving a second, cryptographic puzzle for students who developed an accurate enough classifier.