About The Happy Coder

Making learning about Artificial Intelligence available to all, keeping it simple and small. Love coding, love teaching. I want everyone to learn to code, and use it for good, to help or bless someone.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

By |2025-10-14T04:00:27+00:00October 10, 2025|AI|

Definition and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the capability of computers to perform tasks traditionally executed by humans, such as learning, problem-solving, and decision-making. The objective is to develop machines capable of mimicking human behaviour or intelligence. However, this definition is broad, and differing viewpoints may exist. The primary challenge lies in establishing a consensus on the definition of human intelligence, let alone Artificial Intelligence. Machines operate differently from human brains, yet we anticipate such a capability. They process information in binary (0s and 1s), whereas our brains utilise electrical impulses, which can exhibit similarities [...]

The Creator (review and thoughts)

By |2024-07-31T06:48:23+00:00April 10, 2024|AI, sentient|

I recently watched the film ‘The Creator’, a(nother) dystopian AI future film. Despite it’s many flaws in the filming (not the best) I thoroughly enjoyed it. Especially the special effects and general idea and concept behind it.  (Hopefully no spoiler alerts) It is set in the near future where AI is held responsible for the destruction of a major US city. There is a war between AI and the western alliance. The eastern countries embracing it and giving it a home. The premise is that they are sentient but have become demonised. Sentient Before I offer more critique about [...]

The Black Box Paradox

By |2024-07-31T05:41:40+00:00March 23, 2024|AI|

When we consider that very few people understand how AI works. Even those that do understand the mechanism don’t know how the internal decisions it makes are arrived at. This can make people very nervous when we give it the power to make decisions on our behalf. This is the black box paradox. We know all the maths, the coding and the data that goes into an AI model but how it arrives at the prediction is impossible to fathom. Tweaking The problem starts at the beginning, because it starts with random weights. It is then trained and those [...]

Singularity

By |2024-07-31T05:42:02+00:00March 22, 2024|AI|

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is is generally good at one specific task. Whereas Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could be applied to a wide variety of problems. But there is a growing concern regarding something called singularity where AI becomes super intelligent and takes control over its own destiny. DeepMind DeepMind is a company (owned by Google) that developing AGI. It first developed an ability to play some basic Atari games and then moved onto, what is considered almost impossible for AI, the game of GO. Then they moved past that and tackled another seemingly impossible challenge ‘protein folding’.  What they [...]

What is so Special about Data?

By |2025-10-11T20:19:40+00:00March 20, 2024|Machine Learning|

Effective Data For Machine Learning to take place and for AI to effective it needs high quality data. It also needs as much as it can get. Data is the food that feeds AI. If the food is bad or scarce (or both) then the AI will be do very poorly.  Data can be just that, data, numbers. It can also be words, it can be images, sounds, videos and so on. It converts it all into numbers anyway. This data is pushed through the training process repeatedly to train it. But not all the data is used. Some [...]

What are Neural Networks?

By |2024-07-31T06:43:24+00:00March 20, 2024|Machine Learning|

What are neural networks? Neural Networks are the foundations of much of what we call Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning. Basically they are a type of algorithm that tries to learn patterns from data. The key word here is learn. Just like you and me we need some form of input data, for us it is from our five senses.  Our brains then process that information and try to learn from it. So if you watch a baby trying to learn how to crawl it does it through throwing its arms and legs in different directions and the the [...]

What is coding

By |2024-03-16T17:36:22+00:00March 16, 2024|Coding|

What is coding? For many people coding is a dark art, a mysterious phenomena. You may be thinking why ask the question, it is obvious, everyone knows what coding is. Well it may surprise you that there are a lot of people who really have no idea what it is except it is a thing with weird words and numbers.  I spoke to a group of adults as an introduction to a coding course I was running. They were there for various reasons, one was even an author who wanted to incorporate it into her novel. Some of them [...]

Would you get into a car that was sentient?

By |2024-07-31T06:40:19+00:00February 8, 2024|AI|

Sentient machines There is so much in the press these days about self driving or autonomous cars. With the advancement of Artificial Intelligence especially around Large Language Models that give the impression that they are human. Some people think that these machines are already self aware, a Google employee was sacked because he was convinced that the LLM he was working on was afraid that it might be switched off. He described it as being sentient and that it has rights. If a machine was truly sentient it would have opinions of its own, wouldn’t it? What would happen [...]

What is Machine Learning?

By |2024-02-07T17:15:27+00:00February 7, 2024|Machine Learning|

Machine Learning is the discipline of training a computer to find patterns in data. This data could be in the form of sensor readings, images, historical stock market results etc. It can look at any data and try to approximate. It does this by mapping inputs to outputs and make a prediction. For instance you could collect all the data on houses in a particular area (number of bedrooms, type of house, garage, garden, driveway etc and price sold) and predict what price a new property on the market might realistically fetch. Plant Data Another example might be the [...]

Could we create a sentient machine?

By |2024-02-13T20:04:15+00:00January 14, 2024|AI|

The feeling in the media is that this is already here but I suspect that is based mainly on hype, movies/films, TV series and the like as well as a good dose of ignorance about AI. Yet clearly there are great strides being made in the world of AI apparently. Mostly this is to do with accessibility and application. The technology is improving to such an extent that it is very, very easy to use and access. But that doesn’t mean it is becoming more self aware even if it feels it when it is talking to you as a [...]

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