Over July 4th weekend in 1981, several hundred game nerds gathered at a banquet hall in San Mateo, California. Personal computing was still in its infancy, and the tournament was decidedly low-tech. Each match played out on a rectangular table filled with paper game pieces, and a March Madness-style tournament bracket hung on the wall. The game was called Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron, a role-playing pastime of baroque complexity. Contestants did battle using vast fleets of imaginary warships, each player guided by an equally imaginary trillion-dollar budget and a set of rules that spanned several printed volumes. If they won, they advanced to the next round of war games--until only one fleet remained. Doug Lenat, then a 29-year-old computer science professor at nearby Stanford University, was among the players. But he didn't compete alone. He entered the tournament alongside Eurisko, the artificially intelligent system he built as part of his academic research. Eurisko ran on dozens of machines inside Xerox PARC--the computer research lab just down the road from Stanford that gave rise to the graphical user interface, the laser printer, and so many other technologies that would come to define the future of computing. That year, Lenat taught Eurisko to play Traveller. Doug Lenat says his common-sense engine is a new dawn for AI. The rest of the tech world doesn't really agree with him.

UPDATE: Mar 20, 2016 - Added my new follow-up course on Deep Learning, which covers ways to speed up and improve vanilla backpropagation: momentum and Nesterov momentum, adaptive learning rate algorithms like AdaGrad and RMSProp, utilizing the GPU on AWS EC2, and stochastic batch gradient descent. We look at TensorFlow and Theano starting from the basics - variables, functions, expressions, and simple optimizations - from there, building a neural network seems simple! Deep learning is all the rage these days. What exactly is deep learning? Well, it all boils down to neural networks.

Twitter started the trend of'People to Follow'. This later got replicated by other platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Quora and GitHub. This cool feature lets you connect with the rockstars of various domains and get an access to what is going on their end without bothering them much. For the influencers, this has become an effective way to communicate with their followers. The lives of people on GitHub doesn't appear to as tempting as you would observe on other platforms, but if you love coding, programming and data science, you'll surely enjoy the company of 9 million users on this platform!

Microsoft's attempt at engaging millennials with artificial intelligence has backfired hours into its launch, with waggish Twitter users teaching its chatbot how to be racist. The company launched a verified Twitter account for "Tay" – billed as its "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill" – early on Wednesday. The chatbot, targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the US, was developed by Microsoft's technology and research and Bing teams to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding". Related: How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence? "Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," Microsoft said.

Microsoft's attempt at engaging millennials with artificial intelligence has backfired hours into its launch, with waggish Twitter users teaching its chatbot how to be racist. The company launched a verified Twitter account for "Tay" – billed as its "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill" – early on Wednesday. The chatbot, targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the US, was developed by Microsoft's technology and research and Bing teams to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding". Related: How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence? "Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," Microsoft said.

There are some key aspect to consider in the effectiveness of neural networks. While considering these aspects, you can enjoy this awesome tool for your everyday work.

I will start by giving some background information. Currently I am a final year (graduation year) CS student who got interested in machine learning about 6 months ago. I started with the Andrew NG course from Coursera which I recently finished (about 3 weeks ago). When I finished the Coursera course I saw a suggestion that if you'd like to continue to learn more about machine learning you could follow the online Coursera specialization from the Washington university. In this AMA he suggested that if you'd like to learn more about machine learning one of the things you could do was to follow and complete the Coursera course from Andrew NG and their specialization course.

Summary: I learn best with toy code that I can play with. This tutorial teaches backpropagation via a very simple toy example, a short python implementation. Edit: Some folks have asked about a followup article, and I'm planning to write one. Feel free to follow if you'd be interested in reading it and thanks for all the feedback! However, this is a bit terse…. A neural network trained with backpropagation is attempting to use input to predict output.

Editor's Note: Don't miss our new free on-demand training course about how to create data pipeline applications using Apache Spark – learn more here. Decision trees are widely used for the machine learning tasks of classification and regression. In this blog post, I'll help you get started using Apache Spark's MLlib machine learning decision trees for classification. In general, machine learning may be broken down into two classes of algorithms: supervised and unsupervised. Supervised algorithms use labeled data in which both the input and output are provided to the algorithm.

Developing robust quantitative trading strategies is an intensive, rigorous, time-consuming process with no guarantee for success. In this webinar, you will learn how to apply techniques from the Artificial Intelligence and machine learning fields to improve the quantitative strategy development process and maximize your chances of success with every strategy. Attendees will learn practical applications that they can apply to their own trading and will come away with a strategy they can actually trade live. Attendees should have a basic understanding of quantitative and algorithmic trading. No programming experience is required.