Still Waters Run Deep Learning

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." - Abraham Lincoln Now that I have my machine ready, it is time to dive into the actual study of deep learning.  (Please read my previous blog entries,  In Which a Hardware Platform was Chosen, Part 1 ( link ) and  Part 2  ( link ), where I talked about the decision between cloud and personal device, and between desktop and laptop computers, and the specs of the computer I will use for my study of deep learning.) Nose in a Book... or Screen Do birds even have a sense of smell? ( Wikipedia link ) Nowadays there are so many resources online and offline that you can find instructional material in a plethora of formats, whether you prefer prerecorded videos, live videos, in-person classes, online courses, e-books, dead tree books, audiobooks, etc. It's all out there. What would work best would depend on your preferences, and the way that you absorb material most na...

How Much Computer Do You Need? I buy computers based on best price per pound. This is part two of two posts about how I decided on what kind of computing platform to use for my deep learning studies. If you haven't read it yet, the previous blog was   In Which a Hardware Platform was Chosen, Part 1  ( link ), where I talked about the decision between cloud and personal device, and between desktop and laptop computers. Laptops comes in many shapes and sizes nowadays, with different trade-offs in each design. Due to the GPU requirement, tiny laptops such as ultrabooks are out of the picture, as they do not have the space or the heat dissipation capacity of larger laptops. As this laptop is going to be my desktop replacement and my main computer, I wanted as much of a behemeth of a machine as possible, with the biggest screen and the highest specs available for a CPU and GPU that is within a reasonable price point. The largest laptops in production have 17" screens...

Minecraft Oil Rig Platform by N11ck ( YouTube link ) A New Machine To study deep learning, one must eventually run training algorithms for the neural networks, and this requires quite a bit of computational power. Depending on how recently you purchased your computer, and what it is used for, it may or may not be enough. Perhaps you are a heavy PC gamer, perhaps you use your computer to do video editing, or perhaps you are a game developer and have a top of the line PC, in which case it's likely that your current computer can handle the load for networks up to a certain complexity. As my laptops are several years ago by now, they will not be able to handle the workload, and I must look for an alternative. Cloud Versus Personal Computer Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII. He won't run your workloads, but he will save your planet from destruction. The first choice to be made is whether you will rely on computational resources in the cloud, or have a personal mac...

Youth I've had interest in artificial intelligence since I was a wee lad, from science fiction books to TV series to movies. It opened up my imagination to worlds that could be, populated by strange and fascinating and terrible beings barely on the edge of my comprehension. ____________________________________________________________ Books  Issac Asimov's Robot series I, Robot, a collection of short stories by Issac Asimov In Issac Asimov's Robot series ( Wikipedia link , Goodreads link ) , robots were governed by three simple laws of robotics: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. But these simple laws interacted with the situation that they were in to create inter...