{"id":2473,"date":"2018-01-06T08:50:29","date_gmt":"2018-01-06T13:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/?p=2473"},"modified":"2018-01-06T08:54:59","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T13:54:59","slug":"studying-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/?p=2473","title":{"rendered":"Studying Artificial Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since at least April 2017 I have been studying artificial intelligence. So far this has been an idle line of research since I have not found any practical use of artificial intelligence software, but it remains a fascinating subject. I&#8217;ve read a few books on the dangers of artificial intelligence but I have also explored it on a less theoretical level. You can play around with neural networks because there is a wealth of open source software available and plenty of tutorials.<\/p>\n<p>Artificial intelligence is incredibly difficult to learn. You will need to understand the advanced math of linear algebra and vector calculus. I don&#8217;t even know what those branches of mathematics entail. But my approach has been to learn what I can in the process. So far I have advanced my knowledge of Python, mathematics, statistics, computer vision, and Natural Language Processing. Currently I am reading <em>Doing Math with Python: Use Programming to Explore Algebra, Statistics, Calculus, and More!<\/em> by Amit Saha. This book is helping me to bridge the gap between programming and basic mathematics. But the book doesn&#8217;t really get into advanced math, so much of the material does not pertain to artificial intelligence. In fact, artificial intelligence is not mentioned anywhere in the book. Still, it can&#8217;t hurt for a computer programmer to improve his math skills and my math skills were extremely weak.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;OneJS=1&amp;Operation=GetAdHtml&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;source=ac&amp;ref=tf_til&amp;ad_type=product_link&amp;tracking_id=robertrobbins-20&amp;marketplace=amazon&amp;region=US&amp;placement=1593276400&amp;asins=1593276400&amp;linkId=69656ac593c5d20977f8ff195c3fc551&amp;show_border=false&amp;link_opens_in_new_window=false&amp;price_color=333333&amp;title_color=0066c0&amp;bg_color=ffffff\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><span style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\u00ef\u00bb\u00bf<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Messing around with artificial intelligence can really strain your computer resources. So far I have had to add another 4 GB of memory to my system to improve my processing times. I&#8217;m using a 32 bit system at work which often proves to be a limitation. You really need a 64 bit system to use some libraries. Fortunately new hardware is becoming available for artificial intelligence hobbyists and researchers. I bought a Movidius Neural Compute Stick which is a USB stick that contains a Vision Processing Unit (VPU). Unfortunately this requires you to be running Ubuntu 16.04 and you need an USB 3.0 port for the stick. I have recently bought a new laptop to meet these requirements. I have also ordered the AWS DeepLens from Amazon which is a camera designed for experimenting with deep learning frameworks. I also have my eye on a Parallella single-board computer but that is designed more for massively parallel computing and not artificial intelligence. I am reluctant to invest too much money in artificial intelligence without some clear upside to my professional development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since at least April 2017 I have been studying artificial intelligence. So far this has been an idle line of research since I have not found any practical use of artificial intelligence software, but it remains a fascinating subject. I&#8217;ve &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/?p=2473\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12,1606],"tags":[1485,1609,1608,1607,1028],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2473"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2475,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions\/2475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}