Nathan Capstone Blog

It seems that I am now approaching the end of my time at OSU as this class will be my last. I will also be separating from the Air Force, where I did weather, at around the same that this class ends, so I am really in a transitionary state. Originally I was planning on doing a degree in meteorology as there was program at the University of Arizona that liasoned through the Air Force to offer enlisted USAF weather personnel a BS in meteorology. Unfortunately it seems that this was discontinued so I opted into a post-bacc program at OSU instead. I have no particularly deep thoughts on the matter, my only hope is that it all goes as smoothly as possible I can transition into good job. I am currently stationed in Omaha, Nebraska. Afterwards, I will likely live in France, where my parents are, and try to find a job there.

In choosing a project I was rather torn between A-Life Challenge, which seemed to me to be the most interesting, and doing the ML Breakout project which seemed to me would be the most useful in terms of development since it purported to be a good introduction to AI, which is an area in which I feel it would be useful to gain experience. It was a very difficult choice, since I do find the idea of a simulated evolutionary environment extremely compelling, however, ultimately, I ended up ranking the ML Breakout project over the A-Life Challenge, because I felt the practical skills I could learn could help further learning later on. That said, if I end up with A-Life Challenge, instead I won’t exactly be disappointed. Alternatively, I list the Emulator project as 3rd as I do have an interest in the lower level aspects of computing and that seems to me to be a good project to learn that kind of stuff. I had originally considered ranking it first. However, I realized most of the materials to do similar projects were readily available online, and so I figured I could the project some other time.