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Nikita Arsenov
Nikita Arsenov

Posted on Originally published at kniffy.hashnode.dev on

Hello World: From Sysadmin to Reinforcement Learning

Hey everyone, I'm Nikita.

I'm starting this blog as a home for my technical notes, side projects, and random deep dives. To be completely honest, I don't have a rigid roadmap for where this blog is heading—part of it is simply wanting a space for creative and technical self-expression.

A Quick Background

I’m a Ukrainian-Russian engineer by training, with around 4 years of experience in system administration. Over the last 1.5 years, I’ve been actively diving into Machine Learning, with a particular interest in cognitive science and reinforcement learning.

The Spark

Like many hobbies that turn into obsessions, it started with a single project: building and training a small-scale, AlphaZero-inspired model combining CNN + DQN + LSTM architectures.

It wasn't an overnight success. It took roughly three months of relentless tweaking—redesigning the architecture, fixing gradient issues, and fine-tuning reward functions—before the model finally started showing real, intelligent results. That breakthrough moment was when everything clicked: I realized just how much I love this field, and experimenting with ML officially became my main passion.

What to Expect Here

Going forward, this blog will be a mix of:

  • Ongoing ML and reinforcement learning experiments

  • Notes and thoughts on cognitive architectures

  • Practical takeaways, debugging stories, and engineering logs

Thanks for stopping by! If you're interested in ML, cognitive systems, or just like following along with hands-on technical experiments, feel free to connect or drop a comment.

Tags: #MachineLearning #DeepLearning #ReinforcementLearning #DevLog #Beginner

Top comments (1)

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stanley lam •

Hi mate, my name is Stanley. I'm also training an AlphaZero-style agent (Gumbel MuZero via DeepMind's mctx), trying to solve an OFC variant with 3/4 jokers—probably nobody plays it in the real world. I think I'm stuck on rollout efficiency, and my engineering skills aren't great. I'm looking for someone who could guide me through completing the solver. If you can help, I'd really appreciate it.