I wrote my first Neural Network

I have been interested in neural nets since the 90's. I've done quite a bit of reading, but never gotten around to writing code. I used Gemini in place of Wikipedia to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. The coolest part of this was learning about dual numbers. You can see in early commits that I did not yet know about auto-diff; I was thinking I'd have to integrate a CAS library or something. Now, I'm off to play with TensorFlow.

A new library for constructing neural networks from DeepMind

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.

An In-depth Visual Introduction For Beginners