Machine Learning for

Everyone
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This article in other languages: Russian (original)

Machine Learning is like sex in high school. Everyone is talking about

it, a few know what to do, and only your teacher is doing it. If you
ever tried to read articles about machine learning on the Internet,
most likely you stumbled upon two types of them: thick academic
trilogies filled with theorems (I couldn’t even get through half of one)
or fishy fairytales about artificial intelligence, data-science magic, and
jobs of the future.

I decided to write a post I’ve been wishing existed for a long time. A
simple introduction for those who always wanted to understand
machine learning. Only real-world problems, practical solutions,
simple language, and no high-level theorems. One and for everyone.
Whether you are a programmer or a manager.

Let's roll.

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The map of the machine learning
world

Part 1. Classical Machine Learning

The first methods came from pure statistics in the '50s. They solved
formal math tasks — searching for patterns in numbers, evaluating
the proximity of data points, and calculating vectors' directions.

Nowadays, half of the Internet is working on these algorithms. When

you see a list of articles to "read next" or your bank blocks your card
at random gas station in the middle of nowhere, most likely it's the
work of one of those little guys.

Big tech companies are huge fans of neural networks. Obviously. For
them, 2% accuracy is an additional 2 billion in revenue. But when you
are small, it doesn't make sense. I heard stories of the teams spending
a year on a new recommendation algorithm for their e-commerce
website, before discovering that 99% of traffic came from search
engines. Their algorithms were useless. Most users didn't even open
the main page.

Despite the popularity, classical approaches are so natural that you

could easily explain them to a toddler. They are like basic arithmetic
— we use it every day, without even thinking.

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1.1 Supervised Learning

Classical machine learning is often divided into two categories –
Supervised and Unsupervised Learning.
In the first case, the machine has a "supervisor" or a "teacher" who
gives the machine all the answers, like whether it's a cat in the
picture or a dog. The teacher has already divided (labeled) the data
into cats and dogs, and the machine is using these examples to learn.
One by one. Dog by cat.

Unsupervised learning means the machine is left on its own with a

pile of animal photos and a task to find out who's who. Data is not
labeled, there's no teacher, the machine is trying to find any patterns
on its own. We'll talk about these methods below.

Clearly, the machine will learn faster with a teacher, so it's more
commonly used in real-life tasks. There are two types of such tasks:
classification – an object's category prediction, and
regression – prediction of a specific point on a numeric
axis.

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Classification
"Splits objects based at one of the attributes known beforehand.
Separate socks by based on color, documents based on language, music
by genre"

Today used for:

– Spam filtering
– Language detection
– A search of similar documents
– Sentiment analysis
– Recognition of handwritten characters and numbers
– Fraud detection

Popular algorithms: Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Logistic Regression,

K-Nearest Neighbours, Support Vector Machine

From here onward you can comment with additional information for
these sections. Feel free to write your examples of tasks. Everything
is written here based on my own subjective experience.

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Regression is basically classification where we forecast a number
instead of category. Examples are car price by its mileage, traffic by
time of the day, demand volume by growth of the company etc.
Regression is perfect when something depends on time.

Everyone who works with finance and analysis loves regression. It's
even built-in to Excel. And it's super smooth inside — the machine
simply tries to draw a line that indicates average correlation. Though,
unlike a person with a pen and a whiteboard, machine does so with
mathematical accuracy, calculating the average interval to every dot.

When the line is straight — it's a linear regression, when it's curved –
polynomial. These are two major types of regression. The other ones
are more exotic. Logistic regression is a black sheep in the flock.
Don't let it trick you, as it's a classification method, not regression.

It's okay to mess with regression and classification, though. Many

classifiers turn into regression after some tuning. We can not only
define the class of the object but memorize how close it is. Here
comes a regression.

If you want to get deeper into this, check these series: Machine
Learning for Humans. I really love and recommend it!

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1.2 Unsupervised learning
Unsupervised was invented a bit later, in the '90s. It is used less
often, but sometimes we simply have no choice.

Labeled data is luxury. But what if I want to create, let's say, a bus
classifier? Should I manually take photos of million fucking buses on
the streets and label each of them? No way, that will take a lifetime,
and I still have so many games not played on my Steam account.

There's a little hope for capitalism in this case. Thanks to social

stratification, we have millions of cheap workers and services like
Mechanical Turk who are ready to complete your task for $0.05. And
that's how things usually get done here.

Or you can try to use unsupervised learning. But I can't remember

any good practical application for it, though. It's usually useful for
exploratory data analysis but not as the main algorithm. Specially
trained meatbag with Oxford degree feeds the machine with a ton of
garbage and watches it. Are there any clusters? No. Any visible
relations? No. Well, continue then. You wanted to work in data
science, right?

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Clustering
"Divides objects based on unknown features. Machine chooses the best
way"

Nowadays used:

• For market segmentation (types of customers, loyalty)

• To merge close points on a map
• For image compression
• To analyze and label new data
• To detect abnormal behavior

Popular algorithms: K-means_clustering, Mean-Shift, DBSCAN

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Clustering is a classification with no predefined classes. It’s like

dividing socks by color when you don't remember all the colors you
have. Clustering algorithm trying to find similar (by some features)
objects and merge them in a cluster. Those who have lots of similar
features are joined in one class. With some algorithms, you even can
specify the exact number of clusters you want.

An excellent example of clustering — markers on web maps. When

you're looking for all vegan restaurants around, the clustering engine
groups them to blobs with a number. Otherwise, your browser would
freeze, trying to draw all three million vegan restaurants in that
hipster downtown.

Apple Photos and Google Photos use more complex clustering. They're
looking for faces in photos to create albums of your friends. The app
doesn't know how many friends you have and how they look, but it's
trying to find the common facial features. Typical clustering.

Another popular issue is image compression. When saving the image

to PNG you can set the palette, let's say, to 32 colors. It means
clustering will find all the "reddish" pixels, calculate the "average
red" and set it for all the red pixels. Fewer colors — lower file size —
profit!

However, you may have problems with colors like Cyan◼︎-like colors.
Is it green or blue? Here comes the K-Means algorithm.

It randomly sets 32 color dots in the palette. Now, those are

centroids. The remaining points are marked as assigned to the
nearest centroid. Thus, we get kind of galaxies around these 32
colors. Then we're moving the centroid to the center of its galaxy and
repeat that until centroids stop moving.

All done. Clusters defined, stable, and there are exactly 32 of them.
Here is a more real-world explanation:
Searching for the centroids is convenient. Though, in real life clusters
not always circles. Let's imagine you're a geologist. And you need to
find some similar minerals on the map. In that case, the clusters can
be weirdly shaped and even nested. Also, you don't even know how
many of them to expect. 10? 100?

K-means does not fit here, but DBSCAN can be helpful. Let's say, our
dots are people at the town square. Find any three people standing
close to each other and ask them to hold hands. Then, tell them to
start grabbing hands of those neighbors they can reach. And so on,
and so on until no one else can take anyone's hand. That's our first
cluster. Repeat the process until everyone is clustered. Done.

A nice bonus: a person who has no one to hold hands with — is an

anomaly.

It all looks cool in motion:

Interested in clustering? Check out this piece The 5 Clustering

Algorithms Data Scientists Need to Know

Just like classification, clustering could be used to detect anomalies.

User behaves abnormally after signing up? Let the machine ban him
temporarily and create a ticket for the support to check it. Maybe it's
a bot. We don't even need to know what "normal behavior" is, we just
upload all user actions to our model and let the machine decide if it's
a "typical" user or not.

This approach doesn't work that well compared to the classification

one, but it never hurts to try.

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Dimensionality Reduction
(Generalization)

"Assembles specific features into more high-level ones"

Nowadays is used for:

• Recommender systems (★)

• Beautiful visualizations
• Topic modeling and similar document search
• Fake image analysis
 • Risk management

Popular algorithms: Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Singular

Value Decomposition (SVD), Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), Latent
Semantic Analysis (LSA, pLSA, GLSA), t-SNE (for visualization)

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This includes all the methods to analyze shopping carts, automate

marketing strategy, and other event-related tasks. When you have a
sequence of something and want to find patterns in it — try these
thingys.

Say, a customer takes a six-pack of beers and goes to the checkout.

Should we place peanuts on the way? How often do people buy them
together? Yes, it probably works for beer and peanuts, but what other
sequences can we predict? Can a small change in the arrangement of
goods lead to a significant increase in profits?
Same goes for e-commerce. The task is even more interesting there —
what is the customer going to buy next time?

No idea why rule-learning seems to be the least elaborated upon

category of machine learning. Classical methods are based on a head-
on look through all the bought goods using trees or sets. Algorithms
can only search for patterns, but cannot generalize or reproduce
those on new examples.

In the real world, every big retailer builds their own proprietary
solution, so nooo revolutions here for you. The highest level of tech
here — recommender systems. Though, I may be not aware of a
breakthrough in the area. Let me know in the comments if you have
something to share.

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Part 2. Reinforcement Learning

Finally, we get to something looks like real artificial intelligence. In
lots of articles reinforcement learning is placed somewhere in
between of supervised and unsupervised learning. They have nothing
in common! Is this because of the name?

Reinforcement learning is used in cases when your problem is not

related to data at all, but you have an environment to live in. Like a
video game world or a city for self-driving car.

Neural network plays Mario

Knowledge of all the road rules in the world will not teach the
autopilot how to drive on the roads. Regardless of how much data we
collect, we still can't foresee all the possible situations. This is why its
goal is to minimize error, not to predict all the moves.

Surviving in an environment is a core idea of reinforcement learning.

Throw poor little robot into real life, punish it for errors and reward
it for right deeds. Same way we teach our kids, right?

More effective way here — to build a virtual city and let self-driving
car to learn all its tricks there first. That's exactly how we train auto-
pilots right now. Create a virtual city based on a real map, populate
with pedestrians and let the car learn to kill as few people as
possible. When the robot is reasonably confident in this artificial
GTA, it's freed to test in the real streets. Fun!

There may be two different approaches — Model-Based and

Model-Free.

Model-Based means that car needs to memorize a map or its parts.

That's a pretty outdated approach since it's impossible for the poor
self-driving car to memorize the whole planet.

In Model-Free learning, the car doesn't memorize every movement

but tries to generalize situations and act rationally while obtaining a
maximum reward.

Remember the news about AI beating a top player at the game of Go?
Despite shortly before this it being proved that the number of
combinations in this game is greater than the number of atoms in the
universe.

This means the machine could not remember all the combinations and
thereby win Go (as it did chess). At each turn, it simply chose the best
move for each situation, and it did well enough to outplay a human
meatbag.

This approach is a core concept behind Q-learning and its derivatives

(SARSA & DQN). 'Q' in the name stands for "Quality" as a robot learns
to perform the most "qualitative" action in each situation and all the
situations are memorized as a simple markovian process.
Such a machine can test billions of situations in a virtual
environment, remembering which solutions led to greater reward.
But how can it distinguish previously seen situations from a
completely new one? If a self-driving car is at a road crossing and the
traffic light turns green — does it mean it can go now? What if there's
an ambulance rushing through a street nearby?

The answer today is "no one knows". There's no easy answer.

Researchers are constantly searching for it but meanwhile only
finding workarounds. Some would hardcode all the situations
manually that let them solve exceptional cases, like the trolley
problem. Others would go deep and let neural networks do the job of
figuring it out. This led us to the evolution of Q-learning called Deep
Q-Network (DQN). But they are not a silver bullet either.

Reinforcement Learning for an average person would look like a real

artificial intelligence. Because it makes you think wow, this machine is
making decisions in real life situations! This topic is hyped right now,
it's advancing with incredible pace and intersecting with a neural
network to clean your floor more accurately. Amazing world of
technologies!

Off-topic. When I was a student, genetic algorithms (link has cool

visualization) were really popular. This is about throwing a bunch of
robots into a single environment and making them try reaching the
goal until they die. Then we pick the best ones, cross them, mutate
some genes and rerun the simulation. After a few milliard years, we
will get an intelligent creature. Probably. Evolution at its finest.

Genetic algorithms are considered as part of reinforcement learning

and they have the most important feature proved by decade-long
practice: no one gives a shit about them.

Humanity still couldn't come up with a task where those would be

more effective than other methods. But they are great for student
experiments and let people get their university supervisors excited
about "artificial intelligence" without too much labour. And youtube
would love it as well.

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Part 3. Ensemble Methods

"Bunch of stupid trees learning to correct errors of each other"

Nowadays is used for:

• Everything that fits classical algorithm approaches (but

works better)
• Search systems (★)
• Computer vision
• Object detection

Popular algorithms: Random Forest, Gradient Boosting

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It's time for modern, grown-up methods. Ensembles and neural

networks are two main fighters paving our path to a singularity.
Today they are producing the most accurate results and are widely
used in production.

However, the neural networks got all the hype today, while the words
like "boosting" or "bagging" are scarce hipsters on TechCrunch.

Despite all the effectiveness the idea behind these is overly simple. If
you take a bunch of inefficient algorithms and force them to correct
each other's mistakes, the overall quality of a system will be higher
than even the best individual algorithms.

You'll get even better results if you take the most unstable algorithms
that are predicting completely different results on small noise in
input data. Like Regression and Decision Trees. These algorithms are
so sensitive to even a single outlier in input data to have models go
mad.

In fact, this is what we need.

We can use any algorithm we know to create an ensemble. Just throw

a bunch of classifiers, spice it up with regression and don't forget to
measure accuracy. From my experience: don't even try a Bayes or
kNN here. Although "dumb", they are really stable. That's boring and
predictable. Like your ex.

Instead, there are three battle-tested methods to create ensembles.

Stacking Output of several parallel models is passed as input to the

last one which makes a final decision. Like that girl who asks her
girlfriends whether to meet with you in order to make the final
decision herself.

Emphasis here on the word "different". Mixing the same algorithms

on the same data would make no sense. The choice of algorithms is
completely up to you. However, for final decision-making model,
regression is usually a good choice.

Based on my experience stacking is less popular in practice, because

two other methods are giving better accuracy.

Bagging aka Bootstrap AGGregatING. Use the same algorithm but

train it on different subsets of original data. In the end — just average
answers.

Data in random subsets may repeat. For example, from a set like
"1-2-3" we can get subsets like "2-2-3", "1-2-2", "3-1-2" and so on. We
use these new datasets to teach the same algorithm several times and
then predict the final answer via simple majority voting.
The most famous example of bagging is the Random Forest algorithm,
which is simply bagging on the decision trees (which were illustrated
above). When you open your phone's camera app and see it drawing
boxes around people's faces — it's probably the results of Random
Forest work. Neural networks would be too slow to run real-time yet
bagging is ideal given it can calculate trees on all the shaders of a
video card or on these new fancy ML processors.

In some tasks, the ability of the Random Forest to run in parallel is

more important than a small loss in accuracy to the boosting, for
example. Especially in real-time processing. There is always a trade-
off.

Boosting Algorithms are trained one by one sequentially. Each

subsequent one paying most of its attention to data points that were
mispredicted by the previous one. Repeat until you are happy.

Same as in bagging, we use subsets of our data but this time they are
not randomly generated. Now, in each subsample we take a part of
the data the previous algorithm failed to process. Thus, we make a
new algorithm learn to fix the errors of the previous one.

The main advantage here — a very high, even illegal in some

countries precision of classification that all cool kids can envy. The
cons were already called out — it doesn't parallelize. But it's still
faster than neural networks. It's like a race between a dump truck
and a racecar. The truck can do more, but if you want to go fast —
take a car.

If you want a real example of boosting — open Facebook or Google

and start typing in a search query. Can you hear an army of trees
roaring and smashing together to sort results by relevancy? That's
because they are using boosting.

Nowadays there are three popular tools for boosting, you can read a
comparative report in CatBoost vs. LightGBM vs. XGBoost

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Part 4. Neural Networks and Deep

Leaning
If no one has ever tried to explain neural networks to you using
"human brain" analogies, you're happy. Tell me your secret. But first,
let me explain it the way I like.

Any neural network is basically a collection of neurons and

connections between them. Neuron is a function with a bunch of
inputs and one output. Its task is to take all numbers from its input,
perform a function on them and send the result to the output.

Here is an example of a simple but useful in real life neuron: sum up

all numbers from the inputs and if that sum is bigger than N — give 1
as a result. Otherwise — zero.

Connections are like channels between neurons. They connect

outputs of one neuron with the inputs of another so they can send
digits to each other. Each connection has only one parameter —
weight. It's like a connection strength for a signal. When the number
10 passes through a connection with a weight 0.5 it turns into 5.

These weights tell the neuron to respond more to one input and less
to another. Weights are adjusted when training — that's how the
network learns. Basically, that's all there is to it.
To prevent the network from falling into anarchy, the neurons are
linked by layers, not randomly. Within a layer neurons are not
connected, but they are connected to neurons of the next and previous
layers. Data in the network goes strictly in one direction — from the
inputs of the first layer to the outputs of the last.

If you throw in a sufficient number of layers and put the weights

correctly, you will get the following: by applying to the input, say, the
image of handwritten digit 4, black pixels activate the associated
neurons, they activate the next layers, and so on and on, until it
finally lights up the exit in charge of the four. The result is achieved.

When doing real-life programming nobody is writing neurons and

connections. Instead, everything is represented as matrices and
calculated based on matrix multiplication for better performance. My
favourite video on this and its sequel below describe the whole
process in an easily digestible way using the example of recognizing
hand-written digits. Watch them if you want to figure this out.

A network that has multiple layers that have connections between

every neuron is called a perceptron (MLP) and considered the
simplest architecture for a novice. I didn't see it used for solving
tasks in production.

After we constructed a network, our task is to assign proper ways so

neurons will react correctly to incoming signals. Now is the time to
remember that we have data that is samples of 'inputs' and proper
'outputs'. We will be showing our network a drawing of the same
digit 4 and tell it 'adapt your weights so whenever you see this input
your output would emit 4'.

To start with, all weights are assigned randomly. After we show it a

digit it emits a random answer because the weights are not correct
yet, and we compare how much this result differs from the right one.
Then we start traversing network backward from outputs to inputs
and tell every neuron 'hey, you did activate here but you did a terrible
job and everything went south from here downwards, let's keep less
attention to this connection and more of that one, mkay?'.

After hundreds of thousands of such cycles of 'infer-check-punish',

there is a hope that the weights are corrected and act as intended.
The science name for this approach is Backpropagation, or a 'method
of backpropagating an error'. Funny thing it took twenty years to
come up with this method. Before this we still taught neural networks
somehow.
My second favorite vid is describing this process in depth, but it's still
very accessible.

A well trained neural network can fake the work of any of the
algorithms described in this chapter (and frequently works more
precisely). This universality is what made them widely popular.
Finally we have an architecture of human brain they said we just need
to assemble lots of layers and teach them on any possible data they
hoped. Then the first AI winter) started, then it thawed, and then
another wave of disappointment hit.

It turned out networks with a large number of layers required

computation power unimaginable at that time. Nowadays any gamer
PC with geforces outperforms the datacenters of that time. So people
didn't have any hope then to acquire computation power like that and
neural networks were a huge bummer.

And then ten years ago deep learning rose.

There's a nice Timeline of machine learning describing the

rollercoaster of hopes & waves of pessimism.

In 2012 convolutional neural networks acquired an overwhelming

victory in ImageNet competition that made the world suddenly
remember about methods of deep learning described in the ancient
90s. Now we have video cards!

Differences of deep learning from classical neural networks were in

new methods of training that could handle bigger networks.
Nowadays only theoretics would try to divide which learning to
consider deep and not so deep. And we, as practitioners are using
popular 'deep' libraries like Keras, TensorFlow & PyTorch even when
we build a mini-network with five layers. Just because it's better
suited than all the tools that came before. And we just call them
neural networks.

I'll tell about two main kinds nowadays.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)

Convolutional neural networks are all the rage right now. They are
used to search for objects on photos and in videos, face recognition,
style transfer, generating and enhancing images, creating effects like
slow-mo and improving image quality. Nowadays CNNs are used in
all the cases that involve pictures and videos. Even in your iPhone
several of these networks are going through your nudes to detect
objects in those. If there is something to detect, heh.

Image above is a result produced by Detectron that was recently

open-sourced by Facebook

A problem with images was always the difficulty of extracting

features out of them. You can split text by sentences, lookup words'
attributes in specialized vocabularies, etc. But images had to be
labeled manually to teach the machine where cat ears or tails were in
this specific image. This approach got the name 'handcrafting
features' and used to be used almost by everyone.

There are lots of issues with the handcrafting.

First of all, if a cat had its ears down or turned away from the
camera: you are in trouble, the neural network won't see a thing.

Secondly, try naming on the spot 10 different features that

distinguish cats from other animals. I for one couldn't do it, but when
I see a black blob rushing past me at night — even if I only see it in
the corner of my eye — I would definitely tell a cat from a rat.
Because people don't look only at ear form or leg count and account
lots of different features they don't even think about. And thus cannot
explain it to the machine.

So it means the machine needs to learn such features on its own,

building on top of basic lines. We'll do the following: first, we divide
the whole image into 8x8 pixel blocks and assign to each a type of
dominant line – either horizontal [-], vertical [|] or one of the
diagonals [/]. It can also be that several would be highly visible — this
happens and we are not always absolutely confident.

Output would be several tables of sticks that are in fact the simplest
features representing objects edges on the image. They are images on
their own but built out of sticks. So we can once again take a block of
8x8 and see how they match together. And again and again…

This operation is called convolution, which gave the name for the
method. Convolution can be represented as a layer of a neural
network, because each neuron can act as any function.
When we feed our neural network with lots of photos of cats it
automatically assigns bigger weights to those combinations of sticks
it saw the most frequently. It doesn't care whether it was a straight
line of a cat's back or a geometrically complicated object like a cat's
face, something will be highly activating.

As the output, we would put a simple perceptron which will look at

the most activated combinations and based on that differentiate cats
from dogs.

The beauty of this idea is that we have a neural net that searches for
the most distinctive features of the objects on its own. We don't need
to pick them manually. We can feed it any amount of images of any
object just by googling billions of images with it and our net will
create feature maps from sticks and learn to differentiate any object
on its own.

For this I even have a handy unfunny joke:

Give your neural net a fish and it will be able to detect
fish for the rest of its life. Give your neural net a
fishing rod and it will be able to detect fishing rods for
the rest of its life…

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN)

The second most popular architecture today. Recurrent networks

gave us useful things like neural machine translation (here is my post
about it), speech recognition and voice synthesis in smart assistants.
RNNs are the best for sequential data like voice, text or music.

Remember Microsoft Sam, the old-school speech synthesizer from

Windows XP? That funny guy builds words letter by letter, trying to
glue them up together. Now, look at Amazon Alexa or Assistant from
Google. They don't only say the words clearly, they even place the
right accents!

Neural Net is trying to speak

All because modern voice assistants are trained to speak not letter by
letter, but on whole phrases at once. We can take a bunch of voiced
texts and train a neural network to generate an audio-sequence
closest to the original speech.

In other words, we use text as input and its audio as the desired
output. We ask a neural network to generate some audio for the given
text, then compare it with the original, correct errors and try to get
as close as possible to ideal.

Sounds like a classical learning process. Even a perceptron is suitable

for this. But how should we define its outputs? Firing one particular
output for each possible phrase is not an option — obviously.

Here we'll be helped by the fact that text, speech or music are
sequences. They consist of consecutive units like syllables. They all
sound unique but depend on previous ones. Lose this connection and
you get dubstep.

We can train the perceptron to generate these unique sounds, but

how will it remember previous answers? So the idea is to add
memory to each neuron and use it as an additional input on the next
run. A neuron could make a note for itself - hey, we had a vowel here,
the next sound should sound higher (it's a very simplified example).

That's how recurrent networks appeared.

This approach had one huge problem - when all neurons remembered
their past results, the number of connections in the network became
so huge that it was technically impossible to adjust all the weights.

When a neural network can't forget, it can't learn new things (people
have the same flaw).
The first decision was simple: limit the neuron memory. Let's say, to
memorize no more than 5 recent results. But it broke the whole idea.

A much better approach came later: to use special cells, similar to

computer memory. Each cell can record a number, read it or reset it.
They were called long and short-term memory (LSTM) cells.

Now, when a neuron needs to set a reminder, it puts a flag in that

cell. Like "it was a consonant in a word, next time use different
pronunciation rules". When the flag is no longer needed, the cells are
reset, leaving only the “long-term” connections of the classical
perceptron. In other words, the network is trained not only to learn
weights but also to set these reminders.

Simple, but it works!

CNN + RNN = Fake Obama

You can take speech samples from anywhere. BuzzFeed, for example,
took Obama's speeches and trained a neural network to imitate his
voice. As you see, audio synthesis is already a simple task. Video still
has issues, but it's a question of time.
There are many more network architectures in the wild. I recommend
a good article called Neural Network Zoo, where almost all types of
neural networks are collected and briefly explained.

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The End: when the war with the
machines?
The main problem here is that the question "when will the machines
become smarter than us and enslave everyone?" is initially wrong.
There are too many hidden conditions in it.

We say "become smarter than us" like we mean that there is a

certain unified scale of intelligence. The top of which is a
human, dogs are a bit lower, and stupid pigeons are hanging around
at the very bottom.

That's wrong.

If this were the case, every human must beat animals in everything
but it's not true. The average squirrel can remember a thousand
hidden places with nuts — I can't even remember where are my keys.

So intelligence is a set of different skills, not a single measurable

value? Or is remembering nuts stashed locations not included in
intelligence?

An even more interesting question for me - why

do we believe
that the human brain possibilities are limited? There are
many popular graphs on the Internet, where the technological
progress is drawn as an exponent and the human possibilities are
constant. But is it?

Ok, multiply 1680 by 950 right now in your mind. I know you won't
even try, lazy bastards. But give you a calculator — you'll do it in two
seconds. Does this mean that the calculator just expanded the
capabilities of your brain?

If yes, can I continue to expand them with other machines? Like, use
notes in my phone to not to remember a shitload of data? Oh, seems
like I'm doing it right now. I'm expanding the capabilities of my brain
with the machines.

Think about it. Thanks for reading.

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