The best Todd Hester fan site!!
About me:
I have a degree in computer engineering from Northeastern University in Boston. I am currently attending graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin to study artificial intelligence. Intelligence and learning fascinate me and I am researching reinforcement learning and robotics, specifically looking to make reinforcement learning more open-ended and applying it to make curious robots. For more info on my research interests, check out this page. I was born in Chicago and grew up in Wrentham, Massachusetts. My sister Holly is also starting her PhD this year at Columbia University in New York City studying chemical engineering.
I have been going to New England Patriots games since I was 11 and I am a huge fan. I also enjoy playing ultimate frisbee and bowling. My favorite band is Talking Heads and I think "Stop Making Sense" has to be the best concert movie ever. Although Talking Heads no longer exists, David Byrne still puts on a great show. My other favorite artists are Primus, Herbie Hancock, and Gomez. I'm also a big fan of Seinfeld, I have a page on here ranking all the episodes and listing my favorites.
This website:
This is a website I first designed in college in 2000. There is a lot of old content on here such as random photos, stories, quotes, and projects. The parts that get frequently updated now are the rantings and Patriots blogs and the photo gallery. My rantings has any random thoughts of mine on various topics and the Patriots blog has my thoughts on the New England Patriots. I also have worked on lots of various projects of my own including an online chatbot, designing my own robot from scratch, writing a program to play a 3D version of the classic game Connect Four, writing a program to predict the scores of NFL football games, and trying to write a program to play poker. The sections below highlight some of the better parts of the website. Enjoy!!
RantingsOn this site, I have always maintained pages containing my rantings. These include random thoughts and musings of mine on topics including technology, the meaning of life, politics, and the future. I currently have a blog where I post my rantings and I have transferred my old rantings from 2001-2004 to the blog as well. Here is the link to the blog: Here is the latest entry from my rantings blog: There’s an interesting article in the latest edge on free will and consciousness. Basically confirming what I already believed after reading lots of Dennett and others’ books on the mind. Most of our decision making occurs in the subconscious. Our conscious self either only does the difficult decisions, or is only told after the fact so that we feel that ‘we’ made the decision. This doesn’t mean we don’t have free will: our subconscious decisions are still made based on who we are, our genes, our lives, how we grew up, etc. And Bargh raises another interesting point, do we really know who we are if our decisions are made by our subconscious and not our conscious selves as we believe? Here are some highlights from the article: |
PatriotsI am a huge fan of the New England Patriots. I went to every home game but one from 1993-2005. I currently keep a blog of my thoughts and opinions on the Patriots. In addition to that, there are pictures from when I went to the Patriots first Super Bowl victory over the Rams in February 2002 and other games. I also have scores from my NFL Predictor software. Here are the links: Here is the latest entry from my Patriots blog: It’s time to take a look at what the Patriots might be doing in the offseason this year. Last year, they were near the bottom of the league in both third down defense and red zone defense. So I would expect to see them try to shore up the defense, which is getting old and slow. The Patriots need to worry about players like Bruschi and Harrison retiring (or being too slow if they don’t retire). They also need a DB who can create some turnovers like Asante Samuel did. They were severely lacking in that this year. I would expect them to bring in another pass rusher as well, as the third down defense needs to get more pressure on the QB. |
Pictures I have plenty of photographs on my site, dating from when I got my first digital camera in 2000. I have lots of photos of my friends and stuff, but also photos of places I've been and things that I thought would make cool pictures. Photos from 2005 onward are in the new gallery, and any photos from before that are in the old gallery. Enjoy! |
Projects
I am constantly working on various projects. Most of the projects involve some kind of artificial intelligence, either controlling a robot, predicting NFL football scores, or game-playing AI. The highlight of these projects is a 3D Connect Four game I designed where the computer will look up to 6 moves ahead. This game is available for download here on the website. My robot diary contains every step of the process of designing and building my own robot from scratch. I also wrote a program to try to predict scores of NFL football games based on previous week's stats. Enjoy! |