For applicants to The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, please tell us what from your current and past experiences (either academic or personal) attracts you specifically to the field or fields of study that you noted in the Member Questions section. (300 words or less)
--
Before the Provincial Science Olympiad Preparation Camp in May, computer science was just another field to try. But then I found it to be my passion, the field that I would love to be engaged in for my entire life.
The first time I arrived, I thought the camp would be cramming and boring. It was indeed a cramming camp, as I was learning from almost zero, but my newly-discovered passion in Computer Science turned every bit of boredom into excitement. I learned about knapsack, dynamic programming, and other algorithms - difficult puzzles that demanded to be resolved. I found that solving the problemsets and generalizing the solutions into algorithms as challenging task. As a polyglot, I found joy in translating my solutions into a new foreign language : Pascal, then C++.
Hours of classes passed by as I became absorbed in my courses, and still I spent another hours to study on myself. As I learned more, imaginery of things that I could create with piles of boolean values sparked. I learned the strong resemblance of brain and program: pedalling bike to school was a recursive process, reading book was inputting data, intelligence is a nested function-how would that function be written in computer language?
I discovered that Artificial Intelligence was not merely to be applied in robots. Without realizing it, AI is everywhere : social networks, games, and other automated programs. I started to imagine the algorithms behind programs that I use; something that I previously took for granted.
In the end, I made it to the National Science Olympiad. Unfortunately, my morning coffee betrayed me-it made my heart beat too fast on one of the test days, thus I couldn't concentrate. I failed. Nevertheless, computer science, especially AI, remain as my primary wonder until now.
