Projects
I love building dumb things with tech! Enjoy some of my more ridiculous projects:
Simulates the dynamics of N massive bodies under the gravitational force. Masses are simulated as point masses and propagated forwards in time via kick-drift-kick propagation.
10,000v Jacob's Ladder
I build this heart-stopper to prove to myself that I could safely work with high voltage electronics without killing myself or burning down the building. Currently working on a 3,000,000v Tesla coil.
Lizard Computer
Coming soon.
AI Fish?
I used Q-learning to teach a bunch of "fish" how to avoid "sharks" and eat "grass." This project is ongoing, and is currently receiving a massive visual overhaul in Unity, as well as some algorithm updates so I can play with different models to try to model the social behavior of real fish. I'm generally interested in modeling social cooperation as a multi-agent RL problem, so this has been a fun project that I've been working on.
Space Jam(z)
Sure, there's no sound in space because there's no medium to transmit pressure waves, but there's still SO much energy flying around... I'm developing an application to "audify" space images so they can be interpreted auditorily. Humans are phenomenal at auditory pattern recognition, so the results should be interesting.
Mandelbrot Shenanigans
Wrote compiled python code (gross, I know) to render Mandelbrot maps with over 1 trillion pixels on my laptop's CPU in a reasonable timeframe (the length of a few episodes of Pokemon). In the future I might play around with different sets as well, as it's a great way to learn about the behavior of these complex sets.
Art
I like to draw. Portfolio coming soon eventually.
Marathon/Fundraiser to Fight Police Brutality
As a graduate student I can only donate so much, but want to do more. For every $1 donated, I will walk/run/bike a mile. Send receipts of donations to any of my social media accounts, or email me at kylem@utexas.edu See more here.
The Matzo Meal Purity Test
The OG Rice Purity Test - Passover Edition. I taught myself HTML and CSS for this project, and also learned a lot about how the internet is actually set up. The hyperlinks are 70% of the entertainment value, and definitely worth the 30 hours I spent on this... DNS is confusing. The test is hosted at angry-god.xyz, but be warned, the bible is not always SFW.
The Perfect Sauce
I grew up in North Carolina, and that means I take my BBQ seriously. I've been trying to develop my own ~secret sauce~ for a few months. My sauce is damn good, but it's missing one little thing...
Mancala AI
I keep losing the iMessage mancala game. Never again. I'm building the ultimate mancala playing bot, able to beat ANY opponent.
I cannot sing.
Freshman year, MIT asks for applications for "Tech Bloggers" - students in charge of running the MIT admissions blogs. The blogs are incredible, and as such the competition is fierce. The application allowed us to attach any file type we wanted. This was a mistake, as I knew I would have a captive audience for anything I attached. So I used it as an opportunity to terrorize the MIT admissions staff one more type, with this: a cover of Adele's "Hello", rewritten about the revolutionary war.
I did not get the job.