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AI · July 15, 2024

IC

I created a Neural Network from scratch, in scratch

I spent the past week implementing a 1 Layer Neural Net and training it on MNIST within the visual scripting language provided by scratch.mit.edu. It was tedious, but ultimately not too difficult. The code runs incredibly slowly, so much so that 64 samples of MNIST takes 5+ hours to train on my machine. There were a lot of little mini challenges that were fun to overcome (implementing softmax was very tricky). If you're interested, I encourage you to try and improve on it! More details in the linked blog post.

I created a Neural Network from scratch, in scratch launched on July 15, 2024 with 7 votes, #1,887 of 5,184 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.

What it does

I recently spent the better part of last week doing exactly what the title says. I implemented a 1 layer Feed Foward Network and trained it on (some of) MNIST. All in scratch . It would help a lot to understand the basics of Deep Learning when reading this, but I’ll try to make it accessible to anyone with a high level understanding of the field. MNIST is an image classification dataset consisting of labeled 28 by 28 grayscale images of digits from 0-9. The goal of the model is to correctly identify the label of each image. For each image, the model should output a series of probablities, representing how likely the model believes that the image belongs to a given class. \[ \begin{bmatrix}…from bell-boy.github.io

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