Hierarchical reinforcement learning in a grid world. A manager agent picks sub-goals, a worker agent walks there, and together they learn to fetch a log, build a bridge and get home. A “profit-sharing” reward keeps their goals aligned.
Welcome to my corner of the web!
Hi, I'm Miles. I like working on low-level problems, mostly in AI and cybersecurity.
In high school I wrote a single-neuron network and reworked Karpathy's famous min-char-rnn to show off to classmates. I also co-led the programming club and consulted on my state's first high-school cybersecurity curriculum.
In college I spent two years on computer science and math, and started the ML/AI Special Interest Group. At the time there were no undergraduate ML courses, so we broke the topics down in plain English, with no high-level libraries. The goal was to understand the technology at its core before building anything.
"High-level libraries outsource your understanding!"
These days I run Planned Pixel Studio, where I take apart systems nobody fully understands anymore: legacy replacements and security testing. On my own time I experiment at the edges of AI research, like agents that learn to share profit. I miss the days when anything was possible with AI, and I think there are far more interesting, world-altering things to do with it than chatbots.
Want to chat about any of it? Email me at miles@plannedpixel.com.
~*~ The Workshop ~*~
All 12 things I've built, public and private. Click one for the full story. NEW! means it was updated in the last six weeks.
Vixxing
NEW!Caller verification for IT help desks. Before anyone resets a password or MFA, the caller reads a live 6-digit TOTP code off their phone. Facts leak. Possession doesn’t.
ClaimTracker
NEW!A Django rebuild of a legacy healthcare claims viewer. Reads EDI 837 claims and renders print-accurate UB-04 and CMS-1500 forms, with PDF, Word and CSV export.
Window-Works
NEW!An interactive office floor plan. Look up your seat, reserve a free desk, and let admins repaint the layout without touching the database.
A company directory built over a legacy Microsoft Access database, sorted by department and hierarchy, with birthdays and work anniversaries on the front page.
Toy Browser
NEW!A web browser from scratch in Python, following browser.engineering: sockets, TLS, an HTML parser, CSS and layout. A Rust rewrite comes next.
An agent-based toy model of what happens when AI pulls everyone’s opinions toward the mean. Tracks stability, Gini inequality, opinion diversity and trust over time.
Kaggle’s Santa 2025 puzzle: pack 1 to 200 Christmas-tree polygons into the smallest possible square. Geometric families, simulated annealing and a GPU optimizer.
Sprite-Mapper
NEW!Upload a sprite sheet, click a tile, get its coordinates. No more counting rows and columns by hand.
Dashboard Viewer
NEW!A desktop launcher for department dashboards. Pick a department to open its PowerPoint dashboard, or upload a new version from the same screen.
Convert-Image
NEW!A drag-and-drop desktop image converter with previews. Drop in almost any image, get an ICO, PNG, JPG, BMP or GIF out.
Fruit Classifier
NEW!A single-neuron network in pure NumPy that tells limes from lemons by weight and color. Sigmoid, backprop and gradient descent, all by hand.
~ Cool Links ~
Good reads from my personal stash.
- Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation Two-Bit History
- Chapter 7: Standards Jay Hoffmann's Web History series on CSS-Tricks
- Underground Barbecue Underground Ozarks, a guide to the tunnels, mills and sinkholes of the Ozarks
