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My name is Alexander Anderson. I'm a computer science student at Central Washington University.

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last year I took one of the more challenging courses of my degree. High performance computing.

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In the first week, we were assigned a research project, which was to improve the accuracy of the canon machine learning algorithm.

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canon stands for K Nearest Neighbors and is a lazy learning classification algorithm.

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At first, I felt pretty overwhelmed.

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seemed like every idea I came up with had already been done before, and it really felt like I was reinventing the wheel.

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But my professor and classmates kept guiding me, helping me refine my thinking

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I became really interested and using a genetic algorithm which mimics natural selection. It has a lot of solutions, keeps the strongest ones, mixes them together, and adds small mutations to the batch.

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In my project, the fittest solution for me were the ones that improved my Canon's accuracy by filtering out bad

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I spent weeks reading papers, writing code, failing, fixing things, and trying again.

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And this project, it really pushed me, challenged me, and gave me some confidence.

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I'm grateful to be at central, where the professors really push me and encourage me to try things that might just be a little bit out of reach.