Chapter 2 of my free online book about “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” is now available. The chapter is an in-depth explanation of the backpropagation algorithm. Backpropagation is the workhorse of learning in neural networks, and a key component in modern deep learning systems. Enjoy!| DDI
This is a really interesting vision; I’m looking forward to seeing where you might take this. I particularly like your take on narratives and emotional engagement as integral to improving scientific and mathematical understanding. A couple of quick thoughts:| DDI
I am delighted to announce that the first chapter of my book “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” is now freely available online here.| DDI
Imagine you’re a programmer who is developing a new web browser. There are many malicious sites on the web, and you want your browser to warn users when they attempt to access dangerous sites. For example, suppose the user attempts to access http://domain/etc. You’d like a way of checking whether domain is known to be a malicious site. What’s a good way of doing this?| DDI
More precisely, I crawled 250,113,669 pages for just under 580 dollars in 39 hours and 25 minutes, using 20 Amazon EC2 machine instances. | DDI
It’s tempting to think IBM’s Jeopardy-playing machine Watson must have relied on some huge algorithmic advance or silver bullet idea in order to beat top human Jeopardy players. But the researchers behind Watson have written a very interesting paper about how Watson works, and a different picture emerges. It’s not that they found any super-algorithm for answering questions. Instead, Watson combined a large number of different algorithms, most of them variations on standard algorithms...| DDI
In 2011, IBM got a lot of publicity when it demonstrated a computer named Watson, which was designed to answer questions on the game show Jeopardy. Watson was good enough to be competitive with (and ultimately better than) some of the best ever Jeopardy players.| DDI
On my first day of physics graduate school, the professor in my class on electromagnetism began by stepping to the board, and wordlessly writing four equations:| DDI
Suppose I add a hyperlink from a webpage to a webpage . In principle, adding that single hyperlink changes the PageRank not just of those two pages, but potentially of nearly every other page on the web. For instance, if the CNN homepage http://cnn.com adds a link to the homepage of my site, https://michaelnielsen.org, then not only will that increase the PageRank of my homepage, it will also increase (though in a smaller way) the PageRank of pages my homepage links to, and then the pages ...| DDI
Many thousands of articles have been written purporting to explain Bitcoin, the online, peer-to-peer currency. Most of those articles give a hand-wavy account of the underlying cryptographic protocol, omitting many details. Even those articles which delve deeper often gloss over crucial points. My aim in this post is to explain the major ideas behind the Bitcoin protocol in a clear, easily comprehensible way. We’ll start from first principles, build up to a broad theoretical understandi...| DDI