Well, the other day I had an idea to make something at work work better.
It involved neural nets (lol, I like to go for the easy things).
Anyway, I started today by teaching myself genetic algorithms. It's a fairly trivial example as all it does is find how to achieve a target value by using single digit numbers and the standard operators.
Got that working this morning.
Now I'm working on the next part. I had the idea to do a talk on it at work so I came up with an idea that would work well with it.
I'm creating a neural network (within an iPhone app) that I'm going to use genetic algorithms to "teach" it how to recognise faces
Well, to begin with it's only hand drawn "stick-man" faces on a 64x64 "screen".It's actually not as hard as I always used to think it was.
I might write it up on my blog once I've done it. Essentially you take the "value" (1 or 0) from each pixel of the image and input it into each neuron in the first layer of the network. Each neuron then multiplies each input by a weight and adds them all together if this is higher than the threshold value then you output a 1 otherwise a 0. You take these outputs and put them through another layer using the same maths. Then you pass it in to the required number of output neurons and the output of that is your answer. (i.e. 1 = face, 0 = not a face).
Anyway, I'm currently building the network. The hardest part is setting up the reusable stuff for the first time.
Looking forward to getting it finished though
