pre-learn-of-aix-week-1

Introduction

This is the pre-learning record of my ai+x blending courses, there will be 5 weeks before the Base SPOC session starts, and each week, we will get a learning material in order to help us get ready for the upcoming study, here we start the first week’s pre-learning.

Interviews with AI Leaders

There is a link of a video interview with a leader in the field of Machine Learning and AI.

Video: Tomaso Poggio
Abstarct: Tomaso is a professor at MIT and is the director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. Cited over 100,000 times, his work has had a profound impact of intelligence, in both biological neural networks and artificial ones.

So, what indeed he said in the video?

I record one of the most impressive question:

how far we can get in creating intelligent systems without understanding the biological or understanding how the human creates intelligence.

It is a difficult problem, we are able to fly without using to much our knowledge about how birds fly. it was important I guess to know that you could have things heavier than air being able to fly like birds

in the case of intelligence I think that it’s a bit of a bet right now. …… the question is you can ask people do you think we’ll get there without any knowledge about the human brain.

Exercise of Python

There are exercise designed for we to learn the basics of Python, help us dignose the level of programming ability.

The exercise…too easy

>>>--4
4

Python Documentation

• recommands “Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist” in the mail, I’ll borrow one from the school library.

Software

we’ll be using the Python 2.6.x, so why not the Python3? Well, in any case, I need to prepare the environment.

It is easy for us the create a Python 2.6.x environment using the virtual environment, I’m so familiar with this, so I’d like to explore something interesting otherwise I will have nothing worth to write this blog.

About some problems

ImportError: cannot import name _remove_dead_weakref

I suggest you see the discussion in StackOverFlow pip-python-importerror-cannot-import-name-remove-dead-weakref

in short, just click the pythonw.exe in the python2 floder and repair it!

About the virtual environment

It is a magic to use different kind of type of Python. Thanks to the PATH which tells the Python interpreter which version and where is the Python.exe we use.

When we call the Python interpreter or run the python script xxx.py, shell will search the catalog listed in PATH until it found a python object matched for this command.

virtualenv is a package for creating and managing the virtual environment of Python, it use tricks to achieve:

• change the PATH of current running Shell
• change the runtime path stored in sys.path

to have a clear recognition of this, you can use the python -m site in different environment, you will found that almost everything in sys.path replaced by the path in the venv except the stardard libraries.

How we find the package in the “.py” file? The basis repo provide us a package “site”

import site
site.getsitepackages()
# your site-package path and base of python path