Deep learning is making waves. At the time of this writing (March 2016 ), Google’s AlghaGo program just beat 9-dan professional Go player Lee Sedol at the game of Go, a C hinese board game.
E xperts in the field of Artificial Intelligence thought we were
10 years away from achieving a victory against a top professional Go player, but progress seems to have accelerated!
While deep learning is a complex subject, it is not any more diffi cult to learn than any other machine learning algorithm. I wrote this book to introduce you to the basics of neural networks. You will get along fine with undergraduate-level math and programming skill.
All the materials in this book can be downloaded and installed for free. We will use the Python programming language, along with the numerical computing library Numpy. I will also show you in the later chapters how to build a deep network using Theano and TensorFlow, which are libraries built specifically for deep learning and can accelerate computation by taking advantage of the GPU.
