After what felt like coding bootcamp, I’m finally finished with my first semester at UT. The other classes were alright, but wow I’ve learned so much programming and I’m excited for the upcoming data structures class. Some of my favorite takeaways from the intro class included creating 2d graphics using Java for which my art was selected as one of the top pieces for that semester and creating a program that decrypts a file that has been encrypted using a substitution cipher. Finally, my favorite was perhaps the Critter assignment where we got to implement our own Critter class that would compete with other critters for survival points. What I loved about this one was that we were allowed to use any material beyond the scope of the class and so I went ahead and taught myself about and how to implement a LinkedArray in a few hours. I needed a list to update with no restriction on size because in addition to fighting against other critters, our TA’s threw in unknown critters for which we did not know their fighting patterns to take advantage of. Thus I figured the best critter to create is one that can learn about it’s unique opponents and store the optimal fighting tactic for each said opponent. I included some print statements and I thought it was the coolest thing ever seeing before my eyes my critter learning on it’s own and printing out that list that would get closer and closer to the key list for beating all known critters. I thought is this what machine learning and AI is like? Is this what being a father is like? Then I read that most of all that cool AI stuff is about cleaning data and so then I switched to another topic.