I started my quest!
As the number of mimimi blog posts is so much higher than scientific content, I was eager to start sciencing. The topic of the month is: machine learning via neural networks.
Again…
I have already made several attempts to learn this stuff and write my own weird learning algorithms. The problem is that my machine learning framework of choice (tensorflow) is designed to be very fast and for this reason, the code that is actually executed is not easily accessible. Very soon I was stuck in tensorflow specifics, not quite understanding when to use which hook to tinker with the processing.
I really would love to try some ideas I have about the network’s architecture and the learning. And for this I need to access the code at a low level, but this is difficult in tensorflow.
Probably I should try to code something from scratch. But I have to admit that I cannot build a network just like this. Or at least I am not motivated enough to build one from scratch. Still I would love to change things at a deeper level.
Fortunately, I found this sample code of a tiny network with three “neurons” to learn the logical XOR operator.
Many decades ago, the XOR-task was a serious problem for perceptrons, as the desired output is not linearly separable. So it is quite honorable to play with this toy example and repeat at least some mistakes of the past. And maybe make some new ones.
Also, exclusively for this post, I made a neural network flowchart using latex. My son showed me the overleaf online editor, so I did not even need to find out if my latex installation on my computer still works. Using the tikz package and a similar example as a starting point, I was able to produce the graphic as a PDF. Then, I converted my PDF to an SVG image on the site https://pdftosvg.com/ . Then I installed the Plugin “SVG Support” on my wordpress installation to make it accept SVG files (there is a security risk). Then, I edited the SVG code directly in Notepad++ to change the displayed size of the SVG. And after many trials to set the proper width and height in combination with the viewBox, I just gave up and posted the image as is. How easy could it be?!
Yeah, I should have done this blimey screenshot and just save it as PNG!
And yes, I know my current wordpress theme is crappy in showing featured images anyway. But I am too lazy to search for a new one.
