[Update: I have moved my blog to https://medium.com/sausheong – please visit my new blog, thanks!] Years ago when I was just starting out in my career, a couple of friends and I came together with a new startup idea. The plan was to take a few days off from work, get a hotel room somewhere (co-working spaces were almost non-existent then) and start hacking out our new exciting prototype. However, we were a bit stuck because of our computers. Read more

I was reading the Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos recently. It’s a fascinating read, with some interesting ideas. In the book, Domingos proposed that machine learning algorithms can be placed into one of 5 tribes – symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries, Bayesians and analogizers. Each one of these tribes has a master algorithm of its own. The symbolists' is the inverse deduction (decision tree), the connectionists' is the backpropagation (neural network), the evolutionaries is genetic programming (genetic algorithms), the Bayesians is Bayes' theorem and the analogizers' is the support vector machine (SVM). Read more

A few weeks ago I went through the steps of building a very simple neural network and implemented it from scratch in Go. However there are many deep learning frameworks that are already available, so doing it from scratch isn’t normally what you’ll do if you want to use deep learning as a tool to solve problems. The question is with the many that deep learning frameworks, which one should I use? Read more

I have written a lot of computer programs in my career, most of the time to solve various problems or perform some tasks (or sometimes just for fun). For most part, other than bugs, as long as I tell the computer what to do very clearly (in whichever the programming language I use) it will obediently follow my instructions. This is because computer programs are really good at executing algorithms – instructions that follow defined steps and patterns that are precise and often repetitious. Read more

The earliest memory I had of arcade video games was watching my older brother and cousins going at the video game machines at Genting Highlands. While our parents were at the other types of games Genting Highlands was more popularly known for, we were generally let loose to play arcade games to our hearts' content. Those were the magical days of Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Galaxian, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Centipede and many, many more. Read more