TomBolton.io

Tom Bolton’s AI and Machine Learning Lab Notebook.

Posts by: Tom Bolton

Machine Learning

Andrej Karpathy’s Pong from Pixels has been my exemplar for implementing reinforcement learning. I find that in general, I’m following along with his approach, and I feel that conceptually, it’s making sense. But as I set out to actually create my…

Machine Learning

So with these classifiers and unambiguous accuracy numbers when compared to ground truth, it’s dead simple to evaluate success. But what about this checkers game? Unlike the pong from pixels example, my game won’t be playing against a functioning, trained…

Machine Learning

It’s been a while since I wrote about my checkers project. For a few weeks there, I was able to give it a lot of consideration because I was doing the first course in the Deep Learning specialization, Deep Neural…

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…