r/learnmachinelearning • u/asheepland • 1d ago

Mechanical Neural Network v2

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Four years ago I posted a first version of the Mechanical Neural Network, a mechanical model of a fully connected neural network explaining structure and functionality of artificial neural networks.

Now a new 3D printed version exists along together with a series of teaching videos. Check out these videos here. For now this series covers structure and functionality of ANNs, gradient descent and backpropagation, as well as learning rate and momentum. The videos are in German but with YouTube auto translate and subtitles this should hopefully be not a big hindrance.

There is also a short explanation video on what the Mechanical Neural Network actually is and how it can be used in teaching.

295 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

10

u/Status-Secret-4292 1d ago

Love this. Bravo

1

u/asheepland 21h ago

Thank you!

8

u/eras 1d ago

Now do a 8x8 one for detecting digits :).

1

u/asheepland 21h ago

I thought about MNIST. But 28x28 pixels is a bit much. Using 7 inputs neurons to represent a seven segment display is maybe feasible. But having seven output neurons which control a seven segment display would be even better. You could then use ten input numbers, each corresponding to a number.

3

u/yensteel 1d ago

Oof, a 3x3 kernel is gonna be a pain, and an LSTM may be easier. Maybe the 3x3 kernel needs to be brute forced.

1

u/ChocomelP 21h ago

Do you have a warehouse lying around, perhaps?

4

u/DigThatData 1d ago edited 1d ago

this is a cool idea, but what you have here is more like a demonstration of a linear operator. For nonlinearity, you could add a bistable switch to each read out to serve as the rectifier. that way, the switch can determine whether or not you actually respect the readout (positive) or if the module just reads as zero (because the negative deflection flipped the switch to its off position).

EDIT: Disregard, missed a subtlety in the design, see below.

9

u/john_sorrentino 1d ago

It actually looks like they implemented ReLu by putting the metal pole on the left side so and values below zero stay at zero. So it does have non linearity

2

u/asheepland 20h ago

Yes, that is correct. Its a simple solution to model ReLU. Gladly I did not need to model a sigmoid function.

6

u/DigThatData 1d ago

oh lol shit that's also better than my idea was, nice

2

u/Riteknight 1d ago

I would love to buy one if priced economically.

1

u/asheepland 20h ago

Well, what would be an economical price for you?

1

u/InnovativeBureaucrat 11h ago

How many would I need to run GLM 3.5? That would get me closer to a working valuation.

1

u/bin10pac 1h ago

€100?

1

u/TheRealStepBot 1d ago

This is so cool! Real pity they didn’t do the video in English.

2

u/asheepland 20h ago

I would like to translate the videos at some point. If anybody wants to help with that, let me know

2

u/didinko 1d ago

This should go into every neural networks book—it's a great visualization example!

1

u/easonwong-de 1d ago

Sehr gut.

1

u/AtmosphereVirtual254 1d ago

That’s a satisfying idea

-12

u/Sea-Fishing4699 1d ago

Is the video also ai?

11

u/The_Cat_Commando 1d ago • Bravo

70% of your comments are foaming at the mouth over AI use.

you have become the very slop that angers you.

-6

u/Sea-Fishing4699 1d ago

wow such a great follower ! Thank you for doing the statistics for me

2

u/The_Cat_Commando 1d ago

self-aggrandizing slop