TomBolton.io

Tom Bolton’s AI and Machine Learning Lab Notebook.

Year: 2018

Machine Learning

My personal experience with Neural Networks is that everything became much clearer when I started ignoring full-page, dense derivations of backpropagation equations and just started writing code…(I don’t believe [a lot of math] is necessary and it can sometimes even…

Machine Learning

Yesterday, I put some of the plumbing in place to eventually run a checkers game for one or two AIs. Specifically, the board is represented, the fundamentals of pieces are represented, and the system has a way, for any given…

Machine Learning

I’ve begun in earnest to build the Checkers AI, and right now for the most part that means plumbing. Before I even get to how this NN is going to work, I need to have the framework in place that…

Machine Learning

The one thing that was disappointing in the results of the Python Port of my NN was the time it took to learn the training set. I wasn’t sure what the reason was, and had speculated that it might have…

Machine Learning

As I mentioned, my checkers-playing AI is on hold until I have a few more viable tools available to do what’s necessary. However, since no matter what I do, I can’t stop thinking about the problem, it occurs to me…

Machine Learning

In addition to coursework and reading, I’ve continued to think about checkers—because it seems both challenging and tractable, and I have the basic domain knowledge. These supports two main short term goals for the next 6 months or so. The…

Machine Learning

A while ago, at the time when I was (ludicrously, it seems) considering tic tac toe as a viable candidate for an AI project, it occurred to me that Checkers was a probably a better candidate. I don’t actually play games…

Machine Learning

Before moving on to my next project, I thought a good segue would be to discuss the actual results of porting my NN to Python and some open issues that I have yet to resolve. In general, the port seems…

Machine Learning

I just finished doing what I set out to do about a week ago. I took the my NN number-classifier and ported it over to Python. Here are my thoughts on the process and on Python itself. My Approach In…

Machine LearningVideo Games

From Wikipedia Grinding (gaming) In video gaming, grinding is performing repetitive tasks[1][2] for gameplay advantage… Grinding may be required by some games to unlock additional features such as level progression or additional items. For someone who’s not a professional developer, I’ve…