I joined EteRNA on 23 September 2011 when I was in my first year of secondary school, looking for another citizen science project to do after having tried Foldit and becoming rather bored waiting for scripts to finish. I was active for around a year before I lost interest in EteRNA too, but when I was interested, the thrill of making and solving puzzles, as well as devising strategies and evaluation metrics for RNA sequences, kept me going.
So much has changed in the 14 years since then. In 2012 I became a My Little Pony fan and adopted the new preferred username Parcly Taxel, because I was interested in organic chemistry then and paclitaxel is one of organic chemistry’s most colourful stories. (Naturally, Parcly Taxel is also the name of my MLP self.) My interests shifted towards mathematics – pure mathematics – as I went through secondary school, and I graduated from NUS High School in 2016 with honours in mathematics and chemistry, but already committed to the former subject looking forward.
I went directly into NUS for a bachelor’s degree programme in mathematics, without going through National Service as I would normally be obliged to do (I was exempted on medical reasons). At the end of my first year, my high performance earned me an invitation into a double degree programme (maths and computer science), which I accepted, so in the end I spent five years as an undergraduate and wound up in the class of 2022. As part of the degree requirements I wrote a little thesis on Zarankiewicz’s problem, which can be found here.
I got a job as a data analyst at SMRT (one of Singapore’s two train operators) after I got my two degrees. In my free time there I discovered the Lean programming language and theorem prover, and eventually got involved in its development far more than I had ever been with Foldit or EteRNA. I still visited my alma mater occasionally for student-run game nights (bridge, riichi mahjong), and on one of those nights I was seized with the idea of going back to NUS to do a PhD in computer science based on my Lean contributions. Nothing said I had to get a Masters degree first!
I went through all the required application processes, including picking a prospective advisor, and made the final submission in November 2024. I waited months, still working for SMRT and still proving theorems in Lean, until I learned my application was accepted in April 2025. The most important thing I worked on during this time was the project to formally prove Carleson’s theorem, leading to me being a coauthor of the paper describing the formal proof.
As of this post I am in my first year of a PhD programme in computer science at NUS, having resigned from SMRT to do so. What brought me back here was an assignment in one of my modules where, as part of a team, we had to pick a paper and summarise its results; the paper was about predicting RNA folding and mentioned ViennaRNA.
That brought back all the memories – I found my original email address for EteRNA, reset my password and looked through the user-created guides to solving puzzles. I found my old username Freywa mentioned in more than a few places, such as the C-trick.
“Could this be? Have I been immortalised in the history of this game?”
And I sat down and wrote this tell-all post regarding what happened after I lost interest in EteRNA. I only have one question at this point:
Do you still remember me?