A Writer's Notebook, Day Nine-Hundred-And-Sixty-Two

 A friend of mine stopped by this evening who has some experience with coding and offered to look at the code I've been attempting to get working on my computer.  He was able to resolve certain errors, and we got through a portion of the problem, but he had to shrug his shoulders up at a point and say he had no idea what the problem was.  I think it may be that I need to do more digging and find other options to do what I am attempting.  There are also some options that I am considering, in terms of how to do the actual work in the cloud, using available resources that are already configured for what I am attempting.  There are certain aspects of the way I was going about this that I would want to alter, but I have some thoughts on how to get around the issues I was finding.  There may be a possibility that I can get a version of what I am attempting to do running in that environment, and it would bypass the issues I've faced setting up an appropriate coding environment.

It is funny, as I have been watching and reading a great deal, and most of the concern is about developing an understanding of the concepts and workings beneath these systems.  In many ways, that is something I have an understanding of already.  The general concept with deep learning and neural networks is to create an arrangement of different data filters that parse the information and then pass on the modified data to a series of points down the line, which each are receiving a different slice of data from the first set, and thus each are altering that data in their own way.  This is not a particularly intelligent process, in and of itself, but by iterating through different values, it is possible to create a model, which is essentially a collection of these data filters, that correlates the information to the desired output.  In the end, it is a matter of matching a set of points to the appropriate curve for the output data.  What is difficult for me, right now, is getting the programs to run.  I have actually attempted to follow along with tutorials and run the code as it is presented and found that it didn't work.  It may have been me, or maybe it was a bad tutorial, or one that was out of date.  I don't know.  I am sure I can find my way through this, it is just a matter of sticking with it through the rough patch at the start of my learning curve.

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