Hello and Welcome to Neural Networking [Made Fairly Simple]
Hello and welcome to Deus est Machina – Neural Networking – In search of Machine Intelligence. My name is Liz I am the Admin to this site – I do the writing, the posts and some of the graphics and I will be your guide towards Neural Networks, Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence – Principally what they are, how they work and what they do.
We will look at how Neural Networks already control many aspects of the internet and run many parts of our digital lives, both on line and off line. We will look at whether we should trust them or whether we should we fear them and look at reasons why we are going to need them – but for now, you can trust in me for – I am not a robot.
If you are at all ambiguous about ‘Machine Learning’, ‘Facial Recognition’ and ‘Social Profiling’ then have a look at our video page HERE which takes you to the ’20 minutes into the future’ world of the ‘Slaughterbots’.
Deus est machina.
Like I said above, I am just the Admin for this site, at the start, I knew very little about Neural Networks however, I have a ‘Friend’ I am working with, a semi-android Called Variant B [Bishop] and Bishop knows computer programming ‘Bit Speak’ and Dreams in Binary so what we are going to do is; Bishop will explain to me and once I understand, I will write down the words. So if I can understand it , then, so can you too.
Updating: I will revise the above paragraph – during my ‘tuition’ I have come along in leaps and bounds and found that Neural Networks are not as complex as I first thought. Which leads me to conclude – that with the right information, it is something that many of us could understand and work with – it’s not that difficult really.
Now, there will be a bit of Math involved but no worries if you can add two numbers and maybe multiply a bit then all should be good. So far, it’s just High School stuff. And everything will be explained as we go along. And, happily most of the maths involves just one simple formula that, even I can understand !
I have looked at a few videos on line about Neural Nets and sometimes you get ; ‘Now we shall look at a simple network’ ,,,, then, minutes later they are talking about matrix algebra and dot products. Fortunately both ‘Matrix Math’ and ‘Dot products’ are quite simple so, it just sounds more impressive than it really is ; – We will not do this, things will be explained simply with a minimum of math speak – Besides, the computer handles all of the math so, apart from background knowledge, we can leave the computer to deal with the bulk of the Maths.
As this site is about computer learning and Neural Nets then there will be some computer code involved, however, this site is not principally about coding, it is about the Networks – the code is there for illustrative purposes but, if you want to play around with the code then fine as all the code scripts will be on the relevant pages and it should run on any computer system – it uses P5 java scripts which should run in any browser – even in them ‘Smart’ phones – whooh !
Here. for example, is a bit of Computer Graphics programmed by Bishop in P5 – this is a good as it gets:
FYI – you can look at how the code works by Clicking Here.
We will be taking a look at ‘Algorithms’; a word that is used a lot around the internet. However there is a subtle difference between the different types of algorithm used. A simple algorithm can be as basic as adding two numbers together and as complex as the programmer wants it to be; this is a ‘computational algorithm’, which can be programmed to appear to be as complex as human thought. These are sometimes called ‘expert systems’. The other type of algorithm is a ‘learning algorithm’ – which uses neural networks to try to ‘learn’ to replicate human thought. … Bishop has an excellent example of an algorithm of strategy which appears to be ‘learning’ but is it ?
The Soft Machine..
When I first embarked on this project, I still had a lot to learn [ No sh*t Sherlock ! ] All I thought of doing was an exploration of Machine learning but there was more variance to the subject than I first thought… When you read the ‘About’ page you will see what I am trying to do and why I am doing it – However, during my researches, I discovered something rather satisfying – I will not repeat it all here but take a look at the ‘About’ page and read the section on ‘The Soft Machine.’ This is about the role of women in the future development of Machine Intelligence – I will be developing this section more as we go along -as I find it will become more important to the development of machine intelligence over time than you may think… You can now read the article if you ClickHere.
I am also a member of the Women Techmakers – A group of like minded women who encourage more women to get involved in tech stuff. You can find their site by Clicking Here.
The Site is Open..
The site is open to all who wish to see what I write, However, now it is also open to new subscribers – So what do you get if you register with this site ? Simple, currently you get access to the Forum – you can ask questions and add topics of interest or write about stuff you want to see here – even stuff I don’t even know about. All are welcome to join. I have considered opening up a ‘Buddy Press’ Machine learning Social Media site here and, it is all ready to go. If you think that may be a good idea then – put it onto the Blog – join the Forum – its all here for everyone. Join in and see what can be achieved simply by joining in…
Acknowledgments:
- Banner images courtesy of NASA JPL- Hubble https://www.nasa.gov/
- The Maschinenmensch robot image from Metropolis is hosted by https://giphy.com/
- P5 Javascript is courtesy of the Processing Foundation https://p5js.org/
- Slaughterbot video by DUST can be found at https://youtube.com – follow link in video
- The ‘Soft Machine’ borrowed from the title of a book by William S. Burroughs.
- Women Techmakers logo property of Women Techmakers.
More to come…