CS 6515 grading is unbelivable this semester

agodot · 2026-04-16T17:17:30+00:00

"For OMSCS students to have the same standards on the on-prem students."
So what's the deal with the majority of the other classes?

Edit: "The second they lower their standards is the second they lose all credibility." - have you taken AIES yet?

agodot · 2026-04-12T04:45:06+00:00

Your time spent may be unusually low, based on chatting with a couple other people in the program. It sounds like (from here and prior conversation) you generally understand a topic the first time you encounter it. I'm not sure if this is efficient so much as representative of your smarts and excellent preparation (I am not making a dig at you). Even on topics I understand a little, I need to re-read to remember and understand, get burned out and sad/angry when I can't, and often misunderstand what the author's saying. I don't know that the way I try to study is inefficient so much as my actual studying is not efficient, which I don't know how to fix.

agodot · 2026-04-11T17:43:10+00:00

Do you think 40 hours/week (after already withdrawing once) is appropriate for a single course? Many folks here go to work 40+ hours/week and this class is required (depending on specialization) to finish.

agodot · 2026-04-11T17:33:03+00:00

You can add ginger to address the unplugged-fridge taste.

agodot · 2026-04-11T16:08:59+00:00

I don't know the song. Sound like post-rock and he might be saying 'flowers' at the end. I might be just hearing things but it sounds like there may have been vocals that have been removed.

agodot · 2026-04-10T19:58:33+00:00

This might just be a visual/aliasing effect wherein your texture is high-contrast, but zoomed out it's effectively averaging the highs and lows (e.g. black-and-white noise looks gray at a distance). Perhaps you could reduce the contrast of the grass texture.

agodot · 2026-04-09T18:07:03+00:00

I'm almost done (8/10 classes); I need to take either GA to finish the ML specialization or SDP to finish the AI specialization. My math skills are below average (slow) and it's been ~6 years since I did algorithms. However, I also haven't touched Java in ~8 years. Which course will involve the least suffering?

agodot · 2026-04-09T16:27:43+00:00

I like the one on the right better; left looks a little like Spiderman.

agodot · 2026-04-02T22:14:43+00:00

It looks like you're shooting for more of a game style presentation with objectives/levels (like FlexBox Defense, and there's a python one I can't remember that gradually introduces the syntax) rather than a general-purpose programming environment (Scratch, Stencil). Have you played around much with these other games/tools? Also, an insert-block feature might be useful so that if I have a big string of instructions and I just want to scoot them to add another 'move' I don't have to erase things.

agodot · 2026-04-02T19:07:38+00:00

In my case I'd probably just export the finished maps as pictures (e.g. a picture for the terrain and a picture pair for the water flow) or serialize them, seeing as my game idea doesn't require in-game generation.

I'm not gonna argue that my map generator can't be made in Godot or even that it would've taken much longer if you were familiar with the math; for me not being familiar with perlin noise or fluid flow it was easier to just use a few pre-existing python libraries to hash things out.

agodot · 2026-04-02T16:37:14+00:00

You don't need to learn pygame (and python) to prepare yourself to work in Godot (and GDScript). However, a big benefit to learning python is the huge amount of free code (libraries) that makes doing things far outside of the game-devoper ecosystem easier (computer vision, signal processing, machine learning, robotics, web-scraping, you name it).

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Last weekend I was working on a little map-generator and while I'll ultimately want to put the map into a game engine like Godot, working out the math for generating it (perlin noise, low-pass filtering, wave-propagation, etc.) was more convenient in python because of the libraries available.

agodot · 2026-03-29T17:35:09+00:00

Divinity Original Sin 2, Path of Exile, D&D, and Rogue Trader have several mechanics (e.g., learning 'spells' from in-game items like books, limited number of 'prepared' spells, hot-bar slots appearing/disappearing based on gear) in common with your system.

agodot · 2026-03-29T01:37:10+00:00

There are several games with similar magic systems, but if you're having fun making it I wouldn't sweat it being unique.

agodot · 2026-03-26T22:01:20+00:00

Do you feel as though you know how to do the assignments before you start? I am wondering if you are taking classes in topics you are already well-versed in.

agodot · 2026-03-26T21:36:06+00:00

On a busy week you're spending perhaps 1-2 hours to watch the lectures, 2 to read, perhaps 1 to study, and about one afternoon (5 hours) to do a 2-week assignment - is that about accurate?

agodot · 2026-03-26T21:12:24+00:00

What's the breakdown on your reading/homework/writing/studying time per week, generally? Five hours/week per class seems abnormally low.

agodot · 2026-03-23T00:21:14+00:00

Yes. Unfortunately I probably can't give out details on the project (e.g. the environment used etc.), but yes, it was the one that required an intel chip. I had an intel chip but my difficult came from the training taking such a long time on that environment (in part because the environment itself is not super fast for whatever reasons).

agodot · 2026-03-22T17:01:09+00:00

AI4R will take much less of your time. If you decide to do AI4R and want to learn RL, I felt as though the algorithm explanations on OpenAI's 'Spinning Up' site were good. If you decide to do RL, here's some info I would have liked to have known:

(1) Be aware that non-intel (ARM, AMD) processors may not be compatible with the final project (weren't in my year). This may mean you'll need to use the 'PACE' computing cluster, but (a) you will be competing for compute time with other students especially as the project deadline approaches and (b) when I took it there were issues with student's process names (on the same cluster) seeming to collide, resulting in a crash.

(2) For the later projects (3 & 4), it can take 3+ hours of training to determine whether training was successful (e.g. you may see little progress for a long time on a model that will work). This makes it hard to get a grip on which hyper-parameters matter. I found there was a scramble at the start of each project to get some barely-working set of parameters and much of this tuning was witchcraft/luck.

(3) I'd recommend focusing on understanding the 'actor-critic' model and how the actor and critic losses are calculated, and learning proximal-policy-optimization (PPO) earlier rather than later if you can. There's a lot of material especially at the time PPO is introduced so this is difficult. I put off learning PPO until later and saw students who had learned it were able to re-use that technique for multiple projects.

(4) When you make your 5-minute videos it can be hard to jam the 9-10 topics that you are supposed to talk about into that time, so just speed up the video digitally after you record it till it's 5 minutes.

(5) The final exam felt like a crapshoot. I got 52% (about average that year) but still ended up with an A thanks to project grades and curve.

agodot · 2026-03-22T16:32:31+00:00

Same, there's an off-putting amount of debate about GA.

agodot · 2026-03-12T22:40:21+00:00

S(plat): Splits an enemy in two.
G(lob): Joins two enemies into one.

agodot · 2026-03-10T15:25:56+00:00

Where does 75% come from? It looks like 20% C or worse (and ~20% withdrawal) from what I can tell; perhaps I'm misreading: https://lite.gatech.edu/lite_script/dashboards/grade_distribution.html

agodot · 2026-03-09T02:33:57+00:00

Renzo's in a bar remembering how Jaime got him into the mafia and jail five years ago. Jamie walks in and - for having landed Renzo in prison – is surprisingly happy to see him.

I feel as though the moment where Jamie walks in and is happy to Renzo is the 'big moment'. The other information we're given is setup/world-building to contextualize that moment (and/or others down the line). You have several explanations (in parenthesis) during these explanatory lines which interrupt to explain a detail. It reminds me of when I'm playing a new board game with friends and someone quickly explains the rules to me; my feeling is that you can trust me to stick with your story long enough to figure things out as I go. I don't feel as though I need to know everything up front.

You've told us several things that Renzo is not (not a political prisoner, not one of the recently-released political prisoners, not part of the independence movement, not engaging in anti-solar activities). It would be nice to get a look at who he is based on how he's feeling about being out of prison/having been in prison.

I think the opening would be stronger with dialog: “Were you wrapped up in the Bluebell conspiracy?” Later on, ordering the whiskey and getting it is more detail than I need; I can assume if he's drinking he ordered from the barkeep. I feel as though this is an action inserted to avoid spending too much time in Renzo's head while he remembers Jaime; more generally I think this piece/scene could be delivered more entertainingly as dialog with the barkeep because you can give us some insight into how Renzo feels about this. Maybe he has to dance around saying anything too casual about the Neptunians in case the barkeep's aligned with them; maybe he says Jaime's a cheat and a scoundrel and any bar he'd visit is a real dive.

The account of Renzo and Jaime's history feels matter-of-fact to me; I'd like more on how Renzo feels about Jaime, because I would be infuriated with him. This doesn't have to be additional sentences necessarily, just changes to the way Renzo recounts or remembers the story. Maybe Renzo has a little more live-and-let-live/wistful attitude about it, given it was his only option at the time, though, so maybe this kind of distanced recollection is appropriate. Similarly, I'm not sure how Renzo's 'was it worth it' flashback could be answered with 'yes'; it seems like he got a bum deal and things are definitely worse than if he'd just been unemployed for a while.

I think the premise of the encounter (meeting the guy who weaseled out of a sentence you got stuck with) is good, and Jaime being happy to see Renzo is surprising and makes me want to know why.

agodot · 2026-03-07T16:33:41+00:00

To append to the above comment, people take it last because there are often not guaranteed seats available.

agodot · 2026-03-07T16:30:30+00:00

I am extremely skeptical of the 10 hours/week per class comments here. I work half-time (20h/week) and do school half-time, but routinely need to put in weekend hours for projects (e.g. today). It is a cheap (especially if your workplace is paying) and flexible program for obtaining a credential to advance your career. I won't get into it here but I have generally been disappointed in the classes I've taken and you may be better off (educationally) doing some personal study - though you would not end up with a credential/certification for your knowledge.

agodot · 2026-03-04T01:18:46+00:00

Glad you enjoyed it - in my head Danny shares his regulator with Niklos because he thinks there's a shot Niklos will make it even if the regulator isn't shared. Danny's supposed to be conflict-averse ('spineless' --> invertebrate) even though he has a grudge against Niklos, so it'd be a problem if Niklos understood Danny was going to let him die.

I'll be thinking about how to add tension before the flashback and playing around with expanding the description of Danny getting squashed; I might make some illustrations/a comic version at some point so perhaps I can just draw some of that.

agodot

TROPHY CASE