Despite my critical appraisal Udacity in my last post, I have been trying to keep an open mind and remain optimistic that the course would begin to start pulling its weight in terms of instruction. Having started the next unit,…

I started the nano-degree over a year ago last year. The company I was working for at the time was in some dire straits and I had a lot going on so I dropped it back then. The company ended…

I’ve taken quite a few ML/AI of courses on Coursera, and so far, Udacity is a very different experience. All of the Coursera material is covered by Andrew Ng himself in some fairly bare-bones videos with relatively low production values….

Yesterday morning, for all the reasons I outlined in the last post, I was torn about whether to sign up for the Udacity Deep Reinforcement Learning Nanodegree. So I went to the main course page for enrollment, and for some…

There has been a lot of drama for me in the last month and a half—both in my life and at work. I’ve been plugging away a bit at my model, but that’s mostly rearranging furniture at this point. As…

It seems that the fundamental algorithm for inspecting possible moves from a given board position is minimax (or minmax). As usual, there are different ways to explain what’s going on with this. The Wikipedia page linked to above is replete…

I had decided that I was going to write out in plain english how the AlphaGo Zero algorithm works. My plan is still to do that, but one big component of it is the critical Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm….

That didn’t take long. A mere day after my last post where I laid out my upcoming plans for my model, I’ve thrown them out the window. Instead, it’s time to stop futzing around with anything to do with my…

This weekend, I pushed a bunch of other stuff aside and managed to complete the game-play parallelization effort. It was definitely worth it. Before the refactoring, tensorflow was able to play about 3 games per second. Now it’s able to…

I’ve been making slow progress on refactoring my code to play checkers in parallel. In fact, it’s not merely to play in parallel, but in fact, more like simultaneously. Parallel implies that games going on simultaneously have nothing to do…