Got the first draft of my dissertation project proposal in! Very glad to have some tangible progress there. April is lining up to be a bit of a sprint to the finish. It’s the final 5 weeks of the taught portion of the MSc, I still have four pieces of coursework to get done, including around 5000 words of literature review. I’m in a pretty good place, but I really need to get some progress made in the next two weeks over the Easter break.

What’s currently doing my head in is $\lambda$-Calculus, and particularly our assignment to implement type inference in the $\lambda$-Calculus using Haskell. The mathematics that underpins this is really amazing, but I’m struggling to get it, and wading through an alphabet soup of Greek lettering is hard going. I am making progress, I feel like I really got to grips with function composition this week. Haskell and its reliance on recursion and list comprehension is definitely helping me become a better programmer, it was never going to come too easily. I was a little duped by how well I took to the Foundations of Computation course last semester. Just got to keep working away.

I’m starting to get to grips with the department’s GPU cloud service. My dissertation’s going to have some fairly compute heavy training involved, so it’s good to start to get to grips with the technology involved. I also have a reinforcement learning group project where we’re planning to train an agent to play Super Mario using PPO that the cloud should come in handy for.

In other news, I got surprisingly hooked on the Netflix F1 series this week. I’ve hopped around, watched season 3 first, then back to season 1, and I’m about to finish season 2. I’ve never been into F1 before, but it’s good storytelling. I know sports only matter because of the narrative around them, the stories that they tell, and it’s nice to have a media production company provide a good wrapping and framing of all of that for you (so you don’t have to be too heavily invested).

Reading List