Practical Deep Learning

INTRODUCTION

When I was in high school, I wanted to write a tic-tac-toe program that the user would play against a computer. At the time, I was blissfully unaware of how real computer scientists approached such a problem. I had only my own thoughts, and those were to implement a lot of rules using the crude if-then statements and gotos supported by unstructured Applesoft BASIC. It was a lot of rules—a few hundred lines’ worth.

In the end, the program worked well enough, until I found the sequence of moves that my rules didn’t cover and was able to win every time. I felt certain that there must be a way to teach a computer how to do things by showing ...