My Experience at Cyens Summer Programme 2021
About this summer programme
So, as you might have known from my main site, I am currently studying in Cyprus. And since it’s summer time for me, I have decided (well actually my mom decided) to go to Cyens Gaming And Artificial Intelligence Summer Programme as last year in my first summer in Cyprus.
This free programme is aimed towards high schoolers around Cyprus to learn about game development and artificial intelligence hence the name, and the course spans over 5 days in the week from Monday to Friday 8:00 to 14:00.
The Part About My Experience
Sleeping Problem
Well, per normal, my daily routine in summer is completely messed up as my sleeping time is 2:00 to 12:00.
Also, if you read my previous blog where I upgraded our multilingual system, you know what happened. Although I went bed pretty early at around 21:00 after showering, the inspiration in my head forced me out of my bed.
But this isn’t so much of a problem since even if I sleep at 22:00 or even 23:00 I can still be awake on time. If only I can sleep.
You see, I completely stayed in quiet wakefulness till 3:00 in the morning when I finally fell asleep. Then at ~5:38 I woke up naturally. I had set up an alarm at 5:30 but it failed to wake me up but thankfully I still got up (even if I didn’t I still have another alarm at 6:00).
Then I quickly brushed my teeth and packed the bag. And after a nice breakfast I went on my journey at ~7:00.
Pathfinding
Since I live in Larnaca and the Cyens Centre is in Nicosia, me and my father have to travel a long way to get there.
The first part where we got onto the motorway was ok as my father know the way to go.
I could get some sleep on the motorway but I was completely immersed into novels so I did not.
It was about to enter the city where traffic built up. It is also where the gps on both my and my father’s phone stopped working (probably because of the amount of cars nearby).
I currently have no data plans on both of my sim cards, so I had to rely on offline maps like maps.me.
It was ok but it do not have alternate route feature like google map.
So even after some basic navigating skill to tell where were we I still had not make up my mind to take the left turn where it is basically empty.
And, 10 minutes passed by then I finally realised that the alternate route was doable.
After that it was about ok, until we got near the centre. Where it was all tiny alleys.
No, my father can drive in these, but the problem is the offline maps are not as responsive as others. So we spent a couple minutes to figure out where exactly the facility is.
And finally, I was there and ready.
At the First Half
So each day it is split into 4 periods, each is an hour and 15 minutes long. And the first 15 minutes from 8:00 was for assembly.
When I got into the room. After some inspection of my rapid test, there was already about everyone (in fact, I was the second last person to enter).
Although I attended last year, but I remember nothing of anyone working there at Cyens due to my poor human identification memory (also last year we were at a different location).
When I sat down, my anxiety immediately took over, even more by the fact that I am sitting at the front.
Then, after a few minutes of waiting with no one coming, we started the introduction.
It was the lecturer’s (? not sure about term) self-introduction until I realised that Cyens is actually pronounced as “Science” not “Sense” as I thought ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
After that we introduced ourself. And there was a bit of problem trying to explain what is The Powder Toy, but it was ok.
And then we started, the lecturer started talking about the history of gaming.
From what I see, there is a heavy bias towards talking about text adventure game by the lecturer (jk ヾ(≧▽≦*)o).
But there’s 2 things about it that I am unable to stop myself talking about it:
- There’s not a single mention of Half Life
- There’s not a single mention of Minecraft
Like, these are huge games ain’t it.
Anyways then we had a break and talked about computer graphics and animation when my sleepness took over me so I do not remember much apart from:
- The uncharted example
- The cyberpunk 2077 example
- The pyramid of animation of moving meshes frame by frame, kinematic, physical, behavioral, and the composite or whatever one at the highest level
- The use of normal map and height map in texture
- Materials
- Triangles and quads (modelling)
- Skeleton
- Photogrammetry
- Motion Tracking
- Game Engines tree diagram hardware->3rd party sdk->low level … (can’t remember much but there were: hid devices, a whole branch dedicated to rendering)
- And probably some others
Then that was it for the first half.
The Second Half
The rest of the day was dedicated to AI and stuff, still my sleep took over me so details cannot be retained.
So firstly, we were asked to define AI which I gave the suggestion to google for result (now think of it we could’ve asked wolfram alpha!), and a literal definition: Man-made intelligence.
Then we talked about different ways to train an AI like supervised, unsupervised, and that one where you give feedback to AI.
We talked about AI in games like tic tac toe, chess, go etc.
And different ways to iterate through evolution, only merely though.
There was things about different types of AI to neural network, bases of AI, hill example, and many other things.
After that was the lunch break, I grabbed a baguette sandwich and quickly ate through.
Then I returned inside to remind myself of how tensorflow works with the simple notebook example of function prediction in Anaconda.
The last period was about fat in AI, fat as of fairness, accountability and transparency.
So it was about bias in AI where results are unfair because of something that should not alter the result.
Examples were given like the LoL ranked MMR unfairness.
Then they introduced unfairness in visual identification AI and their demo OpenTag for us to try out the AI.
I did the normal, took a selfie and uploaded.
Then, I decided to try something different.
Introducing, pixiv.net.
So I grabbed a random illustration from pixiv and uploaded and tried.
Then a randomly generated image from make.girls.moe which look strangely like Saber (because of the ahoge).
At last I tried BLUE EYES WHITE DRAGON
The results are as follows (The pixiv one is not shown cause of copyright)
Conclusion
And that is it for day 1, I spent like over 1 hour for this post and I’m too tired to translate it into Chinese, so no Chinese version for this.
Tianyu, Qi
Good Luck!
(づ￣ 3￣)づ