Deep reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for creating effective decision-making systems, but its complexity has hindered widespread adoption. Despite the perceived cost of RL, a wide range of interesting applications are already feasible with current techniques. The main barrier to broader use of RL is now the lack of accessible tooling and infrastructure. In […]| Clemens' Blog
The rapid progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) over the last few years holds the promise of fixing the shortcomings of computer opponents in video games and of unlocking entirely new regions in game design space. However, the exorbitant engineering effort and hardware investments required to train neural networks that master complex real-time strategy games […]| Clemens' Blog
Within these pages are recorded my attempts to wield the highest arcane art and conjure minds that play the game of CodeCraft. Humble Beginnings As all advanced AI technologies, our tale begins with hacky plumbing that lets our game speak in the serpent’s tongue and links its fleeting worlds with magic mirrors made of chrome […]| Clemens' Blog
I spent a good chunk of my time over the last two years applying deep reinforcement learning techniques to create an AI that can play the CodeCraft real-time strategy game. My primary motivation was to learn how to tackle nontrivial problems with machine learning and become proficient with modern auto-differentiation frameworks. Thousands of experiment runs […]| Clemens' Blog
The capabilities of game-playing AIs have grown rapidly over the last few years. This trend has culminated in the defeat of top human players in the complex real-time strategy (RTS) games of DoTA 2 [1] and StarCraft II [2] in 2019. Alas, the exorbitant engineering and compute resources employed by these projects has made their replication difficult. […]| Clemens' Blog
This post documents the eradication of algae from my water cooled 4 GPU build. Part of the reason I wrote this post is that I had some trouble finding any good information on how to get rid of algae, with most sources just describing how to prevent algae from growing in the first place. This […]| Clemens' Blog
This blogpost documents the addition of a full custom water loop and two GTX 2080 Ti GPUs to my previous build. This work was done back in November/December of 2019 but didn’t get around to doing the write up until now. Without further ado, here is the completed machine in full RGB glory: Unless you’re […]| Clemens' Blog
This post documents my recent desktop PC build featuring a 32 core threadripper processor and two 2080 Ti graphics cards. It is specced to allow for another upgrade to four 2080 Ti graphics cards with a full custom water loop. I plan to use it mostly for machine learning and simulating reinforcement learning environments. As […]| Clemens' Blog
This article gives an overview of the implementation and performance of two recent additions to LocustDB, an extremely fast open-source analytics database built in Rust. The first addition is suppo…| Clemens' Blog
I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. The resulting visualizations are quite neat…| Clemens' Blog
