PettingZoo
(2020-2021)
Benjamin Black
I am a computer scientist and software engineer, with experience working in industry and academia settings, with deep experience in machine learning and high performance algorithms, services, and applications.
Much of my professional work satisfaction comes from working with scientists: experts in diganostic medicine, pharamacutical development, physics, computational chemistry, and more. I enjoy learning their language, learning the fundamental science behind their insights and helping finding solutions to their real-world problems using software.
As a hobby programmer, I love building exciting software projects relating to fundamental challenges in machine learning, computer systems, and games/puzzles --- observing the beautiful outcome of well-chosen algorithms and well-designed software patterns as applied to fundamentally hard problems.
On this site, I hope to share some of these projects: the beautiful problems I've encountered and their clean and targeted solutions.
Major Projects
Fast, Simple, Effective Rectangle coverage
(2023)
Using theoretical analysis, practical insights, and persistent optimization to create a simple, effective, rectangle covering strategy.
Fast, Simple Rectangular Search
(2022)
Using Rust to implement simple, extremely fast data structures and algorithms for rectangular intersection problems
Code
Code
Reward Surfaces
(2021)
Hybrid chess engine
(2019)
A chess engine that attempts to combine the strengths of Lc0 and Stockfish, the two dominant chess engines, and succeeds in certain cases.
Code
Code
Hashlife w/webassembly
(2023)
A simple, effective hashlife algorithm in rust and viewer in javascript/webassembly.
Code
Code
Unsupervised Music Classification
(2018)
Project exploring music and how to train a network to automatically group similar music together.
Code
Code