Mental health by way of artificial intelligence!

I decided to try occupying my mind with some problem solving today. I did some work on a simple deep learning project I've been working on. It's a classic in the field of computer vision, recognizing handwritten digits. A while back I downloaded the MNIST database intending to learn more about machine learning by getting my hands dirty, so to speak. Once I put in the work to read their data, I made a feedforward neural network class in C++. I decided to use an evolutionary strategy instead of the usual backpropagation technique, partly because I'm fascinated by evolutionary algorithms and partially because it's much easier to implement. I was able to get accurate classification of over 50% of the digits in the training set and it generalized well to the test set they had never seen. The accuracy is honestly pitiful compared to state of the art, but it's neat to get results so much better than chance just riding on the power of randomness.

Anyway, that was months ago. Today I implemented an evolutionary environment that can load in neural networks saved to disk for further refinement against other well-performing networks. I've benefited from a noticeable decrease in stress after doing some satisfying work. That should help my overall health. I'm still sucking wind like I should, as long of breath as ever. I slept really well, and don't have as much skeletal pain as yesterday. I have yet to get some cardio in today, but I did get outside into my yard for some sun when I watered my clones. It's too early to really say, but they don't look as dried out as if I had left them lying on the sidewalk. I had some waffles for breakfast and a banana. Overall it's shaping up to be a healthy day.

I'm thankful to still be among the living.

Thanks for reading!

I hope you have a safe weekend.