So I was sitting in a lounge full of freshmen, typing furiously, when suddenly I shouted with glee:
“My network! It neurals!”
My task, and I had to accept it:
I’m taking this course called “Learning Systems,” which teaches things like neural networks, genetic algorithms, and other buzzword-sounding devices. Our first assignment went along the lines of:
“Design and implement a neural network that learns through gradient descent on its error function. We give you a bunch of training data; you give us a function that generates outputs for all inputs with an error of less than 10-3 and has low probability of being a local minima. You’ve got one week—go.”
That wouldn’t be so bad, except that this is only one of my five classes, and I like sleeping. Eep.
Traitor!
So I need to do this fast. You might think that as a zealous Cocoa programmer, I started up Xcode and started writing a bunch of @interface declarations. Nay, I say!
This summer, I wrote my research project with Ruby on Rails; this gave me a huge appreciation for that spunky little language. Much as I like Cocoa, I’ve found that since I’ve returned to Objective-C this fall, there’s a whole lot I miss in Ruby.
