Ok I’m actually pretty curious about this myself now. The basic element of an ANN is a neuron I think, and maybe I could personally build a single neuron out of household materials? It doesn’t gotta do much, right?
It needs to be able to receive at least one input (though to be at all interesting it probably ought to receive at least 2).
It needs to sum its inputs.
Something about an activation function. Does this happen before or after the summing? My guess is after; so maybe it’s stuff like “if the sum is less than 4 then make the output be two less than the sum, but if it’s more than 4 make it be the sum times six”.
Then it’s gotta be able to output, ideally to something observable.
So I’m imagining a little circuit board of logic gates with copper wires attached to batteries and a lightbulb that can glow brighter when you give it more juice, with the activation function business happening in a series of insulators of varying strengths [uh, conductors of varying resistances?] and the variable inputs also coming from currents run through different insulators, or perhaps from different strengths of batteries.
What do you think ML people, am I on the right track? Have I sketched an artificial neuron?
Ok I’m actually pretty curious about this myself now. The basic element of an ANN is a neuron I think, and maybe I could personally build a single neuron out of household materials? It doesn’t gotta do much, right?
It needs to be able to receive at least one input (though to be at all interesting it probably ought to receive at least 2).
It needs to sum its inputs.
Something about an activation function. Does this happen before or after the summing? My guess is after; so maybe it’s stuff like “if the sum is less than 4 then make the output be two less than the sum, but if it’s more than 4 make it be the sum times six”.
Then it’s gotta be able to output, ideally to something observable.
So I’m imagining a little circuit board of logic gates with copper wires attached to batteries and a lightbulb that can glow brighter when you give it more juice, with the activation function business happening in a series of insulators of varying strengths [uh, conductors of varying resistances?] and the variable inputs also coming from currents run through different insulators, or perhaps from different strengths of batteries.
What do you think ML people, am I on the right track? Have I sketched an artificial neuron?
Actually I think I’m yearning to do this with marbles and pipes and carefully balanced buckets so the weightings can be totally literal.
Yeah, that sounds right! I think this video supports that idea as well:
That sounds like it’s on the right track to me. Is there any chance you’ve made progress on this?