Tag Archives: Artificial Intelligence

How to train your neural network using a genetic algorithm

Artificial neural networks can be used to solve a wide variety of tasks that are hard to solve using rule-based programming. A genetic algorithm (GA) is a search technique used in computing to find exact or approximate solutions to optimization and search problems.

xkcd: Genetic Algorithms

xkcd: Genetic Algorithms

Working with rgho to basically implement what’s described in the following paper for our project babelbrain: a machine learning algorithm to classify language of a given input.

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Teaching machines is hard

Week four at Hacker School:

  1. User Authentication and Access Control: hashes, salts and cookies
  2. Project Euler using Julia
  3. Machine Learning with a neural network

This past week sounds like a productive week, but somehow I feel that I’m not accomplishing enough.  Does anyone else feel that no matter how much they accomplish, it’s not enough?

Maybe it’s my global (holistic) learner style that Mel explained, which causes me to jump around a lot and not feel satisfied with a concept until that magic aha-moment where everything finally clicks.

Global learner […] absorbs information almost randomly, in no apparent logical sequence. […] but sometimes everything “clicks” and thereafter she can do problems intuitively […]. Although these folks are often global systems thinkers and potentially super-creative, the structure of school poses difficulties for them and they frequently drop out.”

This week, I only hit that satisfying moment on 1 out of the 3 aforementioned projects.

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