Notes from the Island & Pine studio: lessons pulled out of the work on KopeMaps, JellySplit, Cell Division, and the rest.https://islandandpine.com/en-ushttps://islandandpine.com/blog/ai-training-graveyard-cma-es-reinforce-ppo/https://islandandpine.com/blog/ai-training-graveyard-cma-es-reinforce-ppo/Two days in March, five rewritten training pipelines. MCTS lived in the repo for ninety minutes. A phased linear model with 832 parameters got deleted in one commit. The only direct ancestor of a shipping weight file is a 28-weight switching-linear model that took its lessons from everything that failed.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTmachine-learningreinforcement-learninggame-aigamedevpythonhttps://islandandpine.com/blog/alphazero-detour-batched-mcts-value-targets/https://islandandpine.com/blog/alphazero-detour-batched-mcts-value-targets/A month on AlphaZero for a mobile game that ships one forward pass per move instead. Virtual-loss batched MCTS, three value-target formulations in six hours, a PUCT sign bug that burned two days, and why the engineering survived even though the weights didn't.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTmachine-learningreinforcement-learningmctsalphazeropytorchgamedevhttps://islandandpine.com/blog/cloudflare-r2-403-user-agent/https://islandandpine.com/blog/cloudflare-r2-403-user-agent/Cloudflare's bot protection blocks Python's default urllib User-Agent with a 403. Here's the one-line fix — and why I later deleted the download path entirely.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTcloudflarer2pythondeploymentdockerhttps://islandandpine.com/blog/cma-es-hint-policies-deleted/https://islandandpine.com/blog/cma-es-hint-policies-deleted/An in-game hint isn't 'what's the best move.' It's 'what move gives the player the highest win rate against this specific opponent from here.' That observation got us into twenty separate CMA-ES trainings. Then the main model got strong enough, and we threw all of it out.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTmachine-learningoptimizationcma-esgame-aigamedevhttps://islandandpine.com/blog/connected-cell-contour-paths-skia-react-native/https://islandandpine.com/blog/connected-cell-contour-paths-skia-react-native/Replacing per-cell rounded rectangles with one SVG contour path per connected component in a Skia React Native game board. A right-hand-rule walker over a vertex grid, inset padding via right-hand normals, convex-only corner rounding with a clamp, and the 300ms bridge animation that hides the fact that the contour on frame N and the contour on frame N+1 share no structure.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTreact-nativeskiagraphicsgamedevtypescripthttps://islandandpine.com/blog/difficulty-ladder-round-robin-heatmaps/https://islandandpine.com/blog/difficulty-ladder-round-robin-heatmaps/A four-tier AI difficulty selector makes a monotone-progress promise to players. Here's the round-robin tournament, the two heatmaps, and the Math.random() seed bug that turn that promise from marketing into a reproducible assertion.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTgamedevmachine-learningtestingpythongame-aihttps://islandandpine.com/blog/four-tier-game-ai-linear-weights-and-cnn/https://islandandpine.com/blog/four-tier-game-ai-linear-weights-and-cnn/Cell Division ships Easy, Medium, Hard, and Elite. The first three are linear models over 14 hand-crafted features trained with PPO self-play; Elite is a distilled AlphaZero student. Here's why that combination — not just the CNN — is the right shape for a graduated-difficulty game.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTgamedevmachine-learningreinforcement-learningpythontypescripthttps://islandandpine.com/blog/iphone-11-swap-lag-react-native-svg-memo-sprites/https://islandandpine.com/blog/iphone-11-swap-lag-react-native-svg-memo-sprites/Why [JellySplit](https://jellysplit.com) stuttered on iPhone 11 and not on newer devices or the simulator. A React key that accidentally depended on every move, an unwrapped component that threw away its native sprite view on every swap, and a 2 MB per-sprite decoded-bitmap footprint that started evicting the cache under sustained play. Three fixes stacked — none alone was enough.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTreact-nativeperformancesvgexpoiosgamedevtypescripthttps://islandandpine.com/blog/jelmata-ai-board-size-generalization-entropy-pacing/https://islandandpine.com/blog/jelmata-ai-board-size-generalization-entropy-pacing/The Jelmata AI runs on phones with no GPU. A single linear model serves four board sizes, a distilled CNN handles the top tier with a switching-linear safety net for web builds, and a one-line entropy trick makes a sub-millisecond move feel like a considered one.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTgamedevmachine-learningreinforcement-learningtypescriptmobilehttps://islandandpine.com/blog/onnx-expo-react-native-cnn-ai/https://islandandpine.com/blog/onnx-expo-react-native-cnn-ai/A 303 KB distilled AlphaZero lives inside two of my iOS/Android games. Here's the three-part Expo integration that wasn't in any tutorial: the autolinking hole, the Jest sandbox workaround, and the model pipeline.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTexporeact-nativeonnxmachine-learninggamedevhttps://islandandpine.com/blog/puzzle-solver-as-test-oracle/https://islandandpine.com/blog/puzzle-solver-as-test-oracle/A memoized DFS solver runs over every puzzle on each build, precomputes the hint table, then a test simulates playing each one to confirm a 3-star win. Here's how it works — and the seven puzzles it killed.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTgamedevtestingpuzzletypescriptjellysplithttps://islandandpine.com/blog/app-store-preview-videos-in-landing-pages/https://islandandpine.com/blog/app-store-preview-videos-in-landing-pages/App Store previews are already the best footage of your iOS app. Here's how I pulled them into my landing page — and the one gotcha that bit me.Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTindielanding-pagesiosastro