Ai

Trained for a specific task, Neural Networks are like specialized virtual computers

I’ve been thinking about neural networks quite a bit lately. I recently read an article (this one actually) that did an excellent job at explaining exactly how neural networks work, and went on to give an example of optical character recognition (OCR) using a neural network.

Neural Networks really aren’t as complicated as I previously thought. There are a few different types of digital neurons used in neural networks. The most popular being perceptrons, and sigmoid neurons. The idea behind perceptrons is that the perceptron can have any number of weighted inputs, and has a single output which acts like a step function dependant on the weighted sum of the inputs.

Unicorns and things

Last Sunday, I attended another AI competition, this one was hosted at the Shopify lounge in Ottawa.

Firstly, wow, the Shopify lounge is big. It even has a slide between floors!

check out that slide on the left! Unpictured, an arcade machine!

Among the other impressive features, an arcade machine, full wall mural of a unicorn knight battle, and of course, a free espresso machine. It looked like a delightful place to work on a day to day basis.

Last weekend I attended the ‘CS Games’. The CS Games are a Canadian computer science competition that, this year, was hosted at ETS in Montreal. In this post, I will be looking at one of the challenges I participated in: The AI Challenge.

Being my first attempt at a CS games event, I had no idea what to expect. There were 3 people from our school team working on this challenge, and upon arrival, we were told that we would be writing an AI for a two team capture-the-flag snowball fight. There will be two teams, each AI controlled by a different university. Each team has seven players and the goal is to steal the flag in the middle of the course, and bring it back to the starting position, or to knock out all of the players on the other team. To prevent a rush for the flag, at least 20% of the players in the game must be knocked out before the flag can be picked up. Teams will fight a succession of games across a tournament bracket to see who is the best.