An Introduction to Python

Overview

Now we’re going to make our own neural network.

We’ll use a computer because there will be thousands of calculations to do. Computers are good at doing multiple calculations very quickly without getting bored or losing accuracy.

Python

We’ll be using a programming language called Python. Python is a good language to start with because it is easy to learn. It’s also easy to read and understand someone else’s Python instructions. It is also very popular and is used in many different areas, including scientific research, teaching, global scale infrastructures, as well as data analytics and artificial intelligence.

There is a lot that we can learn about Python, or any other computer language, but for this course we’ll focus on making our own neural network, and we’ll only learn enough Python to achieve that goal.

Coding examples

Let’s instruct the computer to multiply two numbers—say $2$ times $3$. Let’s type 2*3 into the editor below and click the “Run” button. The computer should quickly work out what you mean by this, and present the result back to us.