A Primer On Gradient Descent

We spoke about how humans can easily locate where to take a step but how would numbers do this? How would numbers where the downward direction is? Above, we have a cost J which is a function of only one parameter w. This function can be represented through an equation in terms of w. To update w in order to reduce J we first start with a random value of w and then update the value using this equation. Here alpha is the learning rate we spoke about.