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    <title>Writing about design and tech...</title>
    <link>https://pavanportfolio.droptools.site/blog</link>
    <description>Read what Pavan Kumar S G has been up to recently</description>
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    <lastBuildDate>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:15:21 GMT</lastBuildDate>
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      <title>Wrapping Up Season of KDE 2026</title>
      <link>https://pavanportfolio.droptools.site/blog/sok-2026-wrapup</link>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eight weeks ago, I wrote an excited post about joining Season of KDE 2026. Now, as the program wraps up, it's time to look back at what we built. My project had two goals: make the Mankala AI smarter using parallelism, and give the game a visual refresh. Both are done. What Got Built Digital Assets…]]></description>
      <category>KDE</category>
      <author>pavankumargsoundiraraj06@gmail.com (Pavan Kumar S G)</author>
      <dc:creator>Pavan Kumar S G</dc:creator>
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      <title>Amdahl's Law in Practice</title>
      <link>https://pavanportfolio.droptools.site/blog/amdahl</link>
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      <pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[After implementing five different parallel programming models for the Mankala game engine's alpha-beta search, I discovered a fundamental limit: no matter how many cores I threw at the problem, there was a hard ceiling on performance. Our best implementation, OpenMP, achieved 2.73x speedup with 6 th…]]></description>
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      <author>pavankumargsoundiraraj06@gmail.com (Pavan Kumar S G)</author>
      <dc:creator>Pavan Kumar S G</dc:creator>
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      <title>Parallelizing Alpha-Beta Search: Five Threading Models Compared</title>
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      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Continuing my Season of KDE work on the Mankala game engine, I've completed a comprehensive implementation and benchmarking of five different parallel programming models for alpha-beta search. This post explores the performance characteristics, trade-offs, and surprising results from parallelizing g…]]></description>
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      <author>pavankumargsoundiraraj06@gmail.com (Pavan Kumar S G)</author>
      <dc:creator>Pavan Kumar S G</dc:creator>
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      <title>Designing Mankala Logos</title>
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      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[While working on the Mankala Next Gen project for Season of KDE, I needed to create two distinct logos: one for the game itself and another for the mankalaengine backend. What started as a straightforward design task in Inkscape quickly became a lesson in SVG optimization when my initial exports bal…]]></description>
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      <author>pavankumargsoundiraraj06@gmail.com (Pavan Kumar S G)</author>
      <dc:creator>Pavan Kumar S G</dc:creator>
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      <title>Parallelizing a Game AI Engine: Root-Level Optimization </title>
      <link>https://pavanportfolio.droptools.site/blog/benchmark</link>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[As part of my Season of KDE work on the Mankala game engine, I am trying to impleemnt root level parallelization to speed up the AI's move evaluation.  Here's how I achieved about 2x speedup. The Problem: Sequential Move Evaluation The Mankala AI uses the minimax algorithm to evaluate moves, searchi…]]></description>
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      <author>pavankumargsoundiraraj06@gmail.com (Pavan Kumar S G)</author>
      <dc:creator>Pavan Kumar S G</dc:creator>
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      <title>Containerized KDE Development: Building the Mankala Engine with Distrobox</title>
      <link>https://pavanportfolio.droptools.site/blog/distrobox-kde</link>
      <guid>https://pavanportfolio.droptools.site/blog/distrobox-kde</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[As part of my work on the Mancala for Season of KDE, I needed to compile the backend mankalaengine from source. Running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on my host system, I wanted to keep it clean and avoid dependency conflicts while designing digital assets. I decided to build the C++ engine inside an isolated co…]]></description>
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      <author>pavankumargsoundiraraj06@gmail.com (Pavan Kumar S G)</author>
      <dc:creator>Pavan Kumar S G</dc:creator>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://pavanportfolio.droptools.site/blog/profiling-analysis</link>
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      <pubDate>Invalid Date</pubDate>
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      <author>pavankumargsoundiraraj06@gmail.com (Pavan Kumar S G)</author>
      <dc:creator>Pavan Kumar S G</dc:creator>
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      <title>Parallelizing Game AI: A Deep Dive into Multi-Threading Libraries for Search Algorithms</title>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Game AI engines, particularly those using tree search algorithms like alpha-beta pruning and MTD(f), are computationally intensive. As modern devices from desktops to mobile phones feature multi-core processors, parallelizing these algorithms has become essential for creating stronger AI opponents w…]]></description>
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      <author>pavankumargsoundiraraj06@gmail.com (Pavan Kumar S G)</author>
      <dc:creator>Pavan Kumar S G</dc:creator>
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      <title>I'm Joining the Season of KDE 2026!</title>
      <link>https://pavanportfolio.droptools.site/blog/sok-2026</link>
      <guid>https://pavanportfolio.droptools.site/blog/sok-2026</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm absolutely thrilled to announce that I've been selected to participate in the Season of KDE (SoK) 2026! It's an incredible opportunity to contribute to the open-source community, and I can't wait to dive into my project: enhancing the classic game of Mancala for the KDE desktop. What I'll Be Wor…]]></description>
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      <author>pavankumargsoundiraraj06@gmail.com (Pavan Kumar S G)</author>
      <dc:creator>Pavan Kumar S G</dc:creator>
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