Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
2002: Devised without a book what I later discovered was the MinMax algorithm (my father was quite unhappy when he discovered tic-tac-toe game trees penciled on the side of the staircase) and wrote a really terrible chess engine with it. That sparked a lifelong interest in programming. A couple years later, I had a blast implementing AlphaBeta (w&#x2F;pruning), NegaScout, MTDf. Eventually got into NNs, which I used for leaf-node scoring, and made a bot that played on  ICC (Internet Chess Club) that became a recurring opponent for an IM at the time. The IM would chat with the bot, since he was convinced by its play-style that it was human. In college, turned the leaf-node NN into an FPGA to speed up the calculations by parallelizing them.<p>Then I got a 9-5 job and my dreams of working in AI faded into the ether. Life comes at you fast.