How I started with AI at school

I started exploring AI when I was still at school.

Not with Python. Not with GPUs. With a soldering iron 🔧.

Around 1990, a ZX Spectrum — an 8-bit home computer — appeared in our home.

And that was it. Love. 🖤 One that, honestly, continues to this day.

Back then, it wasn’t just a computer — it was a construction kit.

You had to solder the keyboard. For real. Every single key.

Assemble the boards. Put everything into a case.

The case was awful, by the way. 😅

So I built my own — wooden.

And moved the keyboard out separately.

Console + keyboard. I had my own vision 🙂

After that, I started programming. Small things. Experiments.

I wrote a couple of programs.

I don’t even remember what the first one was about.

But there was an algorithm — and I made it work.

That was enough for me back then.

Around 2000, when I was 16, things got really interesting.

That’s when I started reading a paper magazine called Computerra.

It explained early AI research papers in plain language, for a broader audience.

Btw, those ideas later led to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics,

awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton

for foundational work behind neural networks and machine learning. 🏆

What fascinated me wasn’t AI as a buzzword,

but the simplicity and beauty of how it actually works.

Why is AI slow and expensive?

Because every time it predicts the next word, it goes back to check if it makes sense.

By the fourth word, you’re already dealing with millions of checks.

Exponential complexity. Classic. ⚡

Those papers suggested a simple idea:

don’t brute-force everything — cut off dead ends early.

I applied this to formal mathematical logic.

Instead of hours or days to prove the Pythagorean theorem,

I got it down to about 30 minutes —

on an 80286 computer with a 16-bit processor. 🖱️

Just by teaching the algorithm to notice earlier:

— this makes no sense

— we’ve already been here

— this leads to a loop 🔄

That was my first AI-related program.

It made me a member of the Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

I was in 11th grade.

And this curiosity hasn’t gone away.

Even today, AI interests me not as a shiny button,

but as a system —

what’s inside it, why it works the way it does, and where its real limits are.

Did your curiosity about AI start early — or much later in life?🤔