In his 1991 song “Better Class of Losers,” Randy Travis sang that his kind of people were not those who “pay their bills on home computers.” At that time—before the World Wide Web—paying bills on home computers was revolutionary, available only on online services such as AOL and CompuServe.
If you live, work, or just drive around in any large city, you know how frustrating it can be to find a place to park your vehicle. Paying for the privilege is a given; it’s just a question of how far away from your actual destination it will be and how much you will be charged.
As if we needed more evidence that machine learning is making its way out of the lab and into the hands of “regular” developers and their applications, along comes PyTorch, a Python open-source package developed at Facebook that enables neural network modeling, training, and testing, with a focus on deep learning and high performance.
The news around machine learning (ML) just keeps getting better, as new and improved tools and techniques become available and more developers (not just computer science PhDs) can gain experience developing ML-based apps. The latest: Apple recently announced the release of the Create ML framework, a set of methods that developers can use to create and train ML models using Apple’s well-known Swift programming environment.
For much of its history, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies of all kinds have been relegated to computer science laboratories and arcane academic papers. As discussed many times in this space, only recently has the technology, specifically machine learning techniques, advanced to a state where developers at large can experiment with it without requiring a PhD in computer science.
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was, to say the least, a pretty smart guy... in fact, some say he was almost as smart as me. Without the aid of even a dollar-store calculator, he established the physical laws that describe the motion of planets through the heavens. His work predated and inspired Isaac Newton’s development of the theory of universal gravitation.
