A Visual and Interactive Guide to the Basics of Neural Networks

Discussions: Hacker News (63 points, 8 comments), Reddit r/programming (312 points, 37 comments) Translations: Arabic, French, Spanish Update: Part 2 is now live: A Visual And Interactive Look at Basic Neural Network Math Motivation I’m not a machine learning expert. I’m a software engineer by training and I’ve had little interaction with AI. I had always wanted to delve deeper into machine learning, but never really found my “in”. That’s why when Google open sourced TensorFlow in November 2015, I got super excited and knew it was time to jump in and start the learning journey. Not to sound dramatic, but to me, it actually felt kind of like Prometheus handing down fire to mankind from the Mount Olympus of machine learning. In the back of my head was the idea that the entire field of Big Data and technologies like Hadoop were vastly accelerated when Google researchers released their Map Reduce paper. This time it’s not a paper – it’s the actual software they use internally after years and years of evolution. So I started learning what I can about the basics of the topic, and saw the need for gentler resources for people with no experience in the field. This is my attempt at that.