This week I was honoured to receive the 2017 Duke of York Young Entrepreneur Award. The ceremony itself took place in Huddersfield, a town with a strong history of industry and development, and the event proved a great opportunity to meet and chat with students and alumni from other Northern universities, and to learn about their business endeavours.

Expressing ideas and thoughts — whether by some hurried doodle on a post-it or with a finely crafted sentence in a leather-bound journal — is incredibly important.

Life can often feel like a journey towards a specific goal, be it happiness, wealth, expertise, or fame. And just like in artificial intelligence, achieving our goals can be seen as an optimization problem. But what if we thought of life itself as an AI search problem? What lessons could we learn from the various search approaches used by computer scientists and mathematicians?

As part of my university dissertation (The Use of Genetic AI in the Balancing of Competitive Multiplayer Games), I'm programming a card game based on Noughts and Crosses.

Proving the efficacy of the proposed balancing process first required the construction of a two-player game to balance, designed specifically for the project so as to be representative of games the technique might be applied to.