My name is Josh Mahler. I graduated at Champlain College studying Game Programming. I am currently job searching for a programming position. When I first entered Champlain I was passionate about games, and my time at Champlain has taught me to understand the beauty of making them.
Ever since I was little, I loved Artificial Intelligence (AI). I used to watch videos of Stockfish 8 vs AlphaZero and the Dota 2 OpenAI vs pros and was simply amazed. How could a computer learn, and how can I do that too? I took my first programming course for JAVA in high school, and my love for programming blossomed. It was everything I thought about. I say that I “think in code” about most real world things, counting from 0 instead of 1 and putting an if statement when I write something out of habit.
Through my courses, I have learned a ton. Production classes have taught me to work well in a team environment. It has taught me Scrum and Agile development. Programming classes have taught me architecture. What great architecture looks like and how its useful; decoupling code, Event Systems, Component-based systems, inheritance, and polymorphism. More specialize courses taught me the nitty gritty of games – networking and network architecture, graphics and why its important, and of course AI.
In the Game AI course, I learned about many pathfinding algorithms including A*, hierarchical, dynamic, Dijkstra, Floyd-Warshall, and the best pathfinding algorithm in existence, Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT). I learned steering behaviors like flocking and whisker steering. I also learned about useful tools like Utility AI, Flow Fields, and Neural Networks.
Joshua Mahler 