I am a software engineer with a great interest in the natural sciences, especially physics. From my perspective, physics is more than just equations and theories; it is indeed an excellent framework that helps us decode and understand the fundamental principles shaping the physical world. Most of my knowledge in the natural sciences is based on my high school education, but I continuously took efforts to advance myself with valuable resources. Coincidentally, physics sparked my initial interest in machine learning (ML) when I had an opportunity to read about the field from a physics book and learn to use applied ML in an astronomy MOOC course.

Besides coding and exploring physics-related topics, I sometimes turn to music for inspiration and relaxation. Whether it is in the form of expressive lyrics or purely instrumental ensembles, I appreciate the way music stimulates creativity and provides a break from structured thinking. Throughout history, music has also become a universal language for people of all cultures regardless of distance and time.

My approach to gaming goes beyond entertainment. Thus, I am very selective about the games I play whether they are simulation, puzzle, or adventure, and even those I choose can be quite challenging. I am deeply amazed by their mechanics and designs as they represent a combination of art, technology, and problem-solving. Especially with the advancement of computers, a number of simulation games are able to mirror real-world systems with high fidelity and teach valuable knowledge and practical skills. Exploring how the game mechanics work would deepen my understanding of the systems and appreciation of the creation behind them.

Although Japanese is the language I learned in university, I did not dedicate much effort to it since it was not my favorite or prioritized subject at the time. However, I still keep a few notes that help me retain what I learned, which later have been helpful when I started learning Mandarin Chinese and developing a sense of linguitics. It is popularly known that Japanese, besides phonetic Katakana and logographic Kanji, uses phonetic Hiragana symbols to represent most of its function words, such as particles and conjunctions. Similar to function words in many other languages, these words provide important grammatical information, but they do not carry significant semantic meaning. When examining a sentence, these function words play an important role in parsing and understanding the relationships of its semantic components. In contrast to Korean, which additionally employs spacing rules to separate sentence components, Chinese heavily relies on a basic understanding and visual recognition—due to its pictograph and ideograph—of function words to distinguish between different sentence parts.

From my own learning experience, despite having different methods of sentence deconstruction using function words, these languages—and perhaps many others—interestingly share one thing in common that function words are usually categorized as stop words in natural language processing. When facing a new language, in my case Chinese, I questioned myself how much of a Chinese paragraph I could understand without taking the first lessons. I also wondered whether by using a statistical method, for example TF-IDF, to measure how frequently a word appears in a document and across a collection of documents, could the word be identified as a function word or not?

Initially, I had no intention or idea of making any form of public writing. As individuals might have different interpretations of the same concept beyond the provided definition, I believe that I have a unique perspective to share. Through this blog, my purpose is to create a space for reflection, learning, and exploration of a world where the diversity from engineering to art and reality to simulation converges.