The core ideas that make up neural networks are deceptively simple. The emphasis here is on deceptive.

For a recent talk to a group of undergraduates interested in machine learning, I wrote a short tutorial on what I think are the core concepts needed to understand neural networks in such a way that they can be understood by someone with no more than high school mathematics and a passing familiarity with programming.

Thanks to the power of the cloud, you can check out the tutorial and run the examples. Just check out this link. This time, I chose to use Google’s “Colaboratory”, which is like Google Drive for Jupyter notebooks.