A seascape painted on a scrap of wood — little white-sailed ships dotted across a dark sea, under a deep red sky with a headland in the distance. Found the wood, found some paint, and just went for it.

A handmade replica of the bath token from Spirited Away, carved from wood and finished with paint and gold leaf. Made as a gift for a friend.

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.