I am a Software Architect / Engineer / Developer / Computer Scientist or whatever interests me at the moment. I have been at this since before 1980, before I even graduated from high school.
Most of my recent works are here. “Recent”, meaning the past 20 years or so. Most of my work before then have been lost to the winds of time and dead hard drives and obsoleted formats. Not that you are interested in anything back that far!
I am no longer using GitHub as my primary repo service. After GitHub a.k.a Microsoft yanked the repo of a very popular media downloader – and there was no call for that – I created my private repo, and now only sync here when the project is complete. So if you don’t see any recent commits here, that is why. If, for whatever the reason, Microsoft chooses to yank one of my repos here, I won’t be blown out of the water. And I should be mirroring everything on GitLab!!!
However, I will use Github for some of my work, anyway.
One of the very first software that I wrote was a Gravity Well Simulator that I wrote for the Apple II back in 1978 or so. I was 16 at the time, and what I learned from calculus (which I mastered at 13) made this even possible at all. I “reinvented” some numerical methods to do the integration necessary. I had very limited access to resources back then, so I did my best.
In 1980, I wrote an OS from scratch for the Nova 4X computer (Data General), including the drivers for the tape transport and the hard drive, the size of a washing machine, with the removal disk packs. I was only 18 at the time, and had no idea about what it was I was really doing. I had a mentor who guided me a bit, but he was busy writing the C compiler for this machine, and I did help him with that as well.
It seems that gravity has been tugging at me throughtout my career… well, I’ve always been fascinated by gravity and black holes and in cosmology in general. During my Amiga days, I created the Mitchell Gravity Set fractal. I have recreated implementations of that on the old MFC framework using the Microsoft C++ compiler and IDE, and again on an early version of Qt on Linux back when Qt were referring to themselves as “Trolltech”, and now a 3D version is in the works. 3D volumetric / iso-surface rendering is vastly more complex, so it’s taking me a bit longer, but it will also represent my first major attempts at GPU graphics. My “hello world”, if you will.
I also now live in Germany, and have been here for the past 6 years at least. Germany is a lovely country, and I like being central to most of Europe. At most, a 90-minute flight (assuming direct!!) Ich sprache manche Deutsch!
I hope to be able to bring about AGI someday. I already have a good idea how to do this, based on the dedicated research of others. However, we will ultimately need a new kind of hardware to pull it off. Von Neumann-type machines have an inherent bottleneck. And forget gradient descent approaches, or even running on GPUs. They simply cannot scale to what is needed.
I, now, as on 2022, have an idea for such hardware, but I need to do a ton of research. As an old mentor once said: creativity is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And my time is limited, and I am not getting any younger.
I am also trying to resolve how I can merge the concepts of NEAT and HTM to produce something truly novel. Time to become more like Elon Musk and start doing something wiht the many ideas I have brewing in this brain of mine.