Make Your Own Neural Network with Ruby

Abstract

Since the breakthroughs five years ago that unleashed deep learning on the world, it has been described as being able to automate any mental task that would take an average human less than one second of thought. I’ll give a gentle introduction to the mathematics and principles underlying neural networks–the basis for deep learning–and we will use Ruby to build our own neural network, from scratch, to recognize handwritten numbers with near state-of-the-art (circa 95%) accuracy.