Thesis progress and the search for post-academic life

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I’m still alive! Quite busy, but alive. This is an update for those that are curious on how my PhD thesis is progressing, as well as my plans beyond it.

Thesis

160 pages in and I almost have the first content chapter done. My plan is to have 3 content chapters, alongside the usual literature review and other sidekick chapters. Coming as no surprise to anyone, the first main chapter is about evolutionary algorithms and game balance as a generic method to altering existing games, based on work published in EvoStar and work done with MindArk.

One would think it’s enough to just reiterate what was written in that paper, add some fluff, then be done. But no, that’s not a thesis. In the EvoStar paper I arbitrarily selected some constants for various algorithm parameters.
That might have been ok then, but good rigour has me testing various permutations and configurations of those values.

I did consider using a GA to evolve the best GA parameters to evolve the best suggestions for balancing a game. But that’s just crazy.

In other news, running StarCraft experiments still takes forever. Almost a day per run, where a run means about 20000 games played over 24 threads.

Beyond that, I’m really happy with how the thesis is progressing. It’s a lot less scarier than I expected it would be. For now.

Post-academic life

Some of you might know that I’m looking for a job! Some place to work after my 8 years of university life. A, how does one call it… real job. A grown-up experience.

If your company is based in London and needs a machine learning / data science person with great programming skills, comfortable with public speaking and leadership, as well as many other great wonderful amazing skills (no bias, honest), send me a message! Twitter, LinkedIn, the contact form on this website, any of these should receive a reply.

While I would not say no to opportunities in the game development world, I am looking for experience in other areas, such as financial institutions. Not exclusively though. Starting in mid-May, I will be in London, so you can get a conversation with me live if preferred!