LazyFox :: Resume

Hi, I'm Peter Paul Elfferich

I was born the 16th of August 1979 at Almelo, spent most of my childhood in Leerdam and am now living in Amsterdam since 1994. I'm currently graduating from computer science at the HvA for my bachelor's degree and I'm looking for an exciting international career.

Computers

Growing up around computers I was never really that interested in them untill my brother moved out in 1994 and left his 386 in my custody. While my brother was an early preacher of the internet, I was more interested in downloading games and programs from BBS's with my modem.

Programming

In 1996 I got my hands on Turbo Pascal 7.0 and found some books to teach myself procedural programming. Soon enough I had programmed several games, the culmination of which was Nibbles ST, a Star Trek themed version of snake boasting 256 color VGA graphics and SoundBlaster sounds.

Gaming

In 1997 I was one of the first people in Holland to have a DSL connection thanks to the Snelnet experiment by KPN. Around the same time Quake2 hit the shelves which I subsequently really enjoyed playing online. I ran one of the first dutch Quake2 servers and started my own clan (TQA) which became one of the best Q2CTF clans (3rd place in 2000). While working with me on my clan website, clan member Talita got inspired by our automated agenda system and founded www.clanbase.com. Their website has grown to become the largest online gaming community and competition website in the world so I'm proud to have user id #1.

Mobile

ExMachina is a company enabling multiplayer gaming since 1998. At the end of 2002 they started research on mobile phones as a new platform for their multiplayer game engine. During my internship there I successfully developed two proof of concept games (MTQ and Topo). Following that internship I returned to develop a demo game with another student. We designed and implemented a multiplayer racing game pushing the envelope to new limits. Razor realized a realtime multiplayer experience despite the GPRS network's high latency. At the end of 2003 I adapted Razor to run on phones in an experimental UMTS network at the technical university of Delft (TUDelft). Participants of the MIES project could play against each other, providing the entertainment to the suite of personalized services.

Go AI

Another one of my interests is the field of AI (Artifical Intelligence). More specifically, I've been working on a Go AI project based on using neural networks to predict final board positions based on earlier game situations. To this end I also developed BackPack, a tool for training neural networks using back-propagation. Many people find the game of Go more challenging then chess and it's mathematically proven to be much more complicated to solve. I developed a reasonably good evaluation function for game situations and a program that can play against humans or other AI's (AreaGo).

China

Another passion, besides playing games, that has recently grown stronger is travelling. And another area I've been taking courses in, besides software engineering, is business engineering. For my graduate internship, I went to China and performed a CMMI appraisal at Huatek, a software engineering outsourcing company. This internship really improved my business skills and taught me a lot about CMMI. And, of course, I had a great time travelling around China, enjoying the wonderful culture, history and, my favorite, the delicious food!

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