[cheschire]

It took me till my late 30's to realize this is the power of a graduate degree. There are lots of people out there who understand programming, and there's a tier of programmers who understand research as a fundamental part of it.

You don't need a graduate degree to understand it, but conveying that you understand it on your resume is hard to do in any universally meaningful way without that degree. The words that would grab the attention of the tech lead, the PM, and the HR are all different.

[payasr]

The freedom to think abstractly and not in terms of everything-is-on-fire-all-the-time is absolutely the best thing about being a graduate student :)

[username90]

The problem with many phd's is that they don't understand how useless research papers are in most cases. You have very tight constraints and the algorithms written by researchers are almost never optimal, you have to do significant tweaks or reinvent it entirely to fit it into your constraints.

In this case you just linked a bunch of irrelevant papers that didn't solve the problem (pathfinding on an infinite and mutable map) and calling the developers ignorant for not looking at them. It is you who are ignorant thinking that you being a grad student means that you must know better than professionals, and also you lack reading comprehension since they didn't even claim their approach is new. This blog was not meant to contribute as a research paper, it was meant to show the community what improvements for the game they were working on.