Brain.js

by hliyan • 8 years ago

273 51 8 years ago

From the README:

    brain.js is a library of Neural Networks written in JavaScript.

hombre_fatal3• 8 years ago

A 19-part interactive neural network course that uses brain.js was posted to HN last week: https://scrimba.com/g/gneuralnetworks

Etheryte2• 8 years ago

Even as someone who has only superficial knowledge of the topic, that course was very underwhelming.

sickcodebruh• 8 years ago

As someone with absolutely no knowledge of the topic, I found that course to be very digestible and pleasant.

axel18012• 8 years ago

Ty for your thought. I'd love to know more specifics.

WrtCdEvrydy2• 8 years ago

For reference, NodeJS support for GPUs will only drop under version 2, so if you're planning on GPU acceleration, this is not for you.

axel18012• 8 years ago

This is Robert, the lead developer for brain.js. Ty for the plug! I was going to mention this, nice to see people listening and helping spread the word. Working on it hard guys! When spare time cannot be had, just stay up late, and get up early!

songzme• 8 years ago

I just went through the 19-part interactive neural network and this is the best tutorial for beginners I've encountered. Each video is < 10 minutes and contains a practical example that motivated me to try implementing / prototype something quickly.

And doing all the examples directly on the browser creates a very low barrier to entry as a front end developer.

berdon• 8 years ago

Saw this and thought, "Huh, I wonder if harthur is back at it", but nope. Nice to see someone picked it up though!

franciscop• 8 years ago

I followed the progress back then and felt very bad for both, that such an awesome library was going down and the bad situation she found herself into. Hope she is doing well! And happy to see brain being reborn.

jtloong• 8 years ago

I think she followed up a few years later and said that the bad situation she was in was unrelated to her leaving Github. It was mostly the time commitment of maintaining many open source projects.

hliyan2• 8 years ago

What happened to the author? I'm not aware of the history...

boltzmannbrain2• 8 years ago

y tho? https://js.tensorflow.org/

felipellrocha• 8 years ago

Y not tho?

calibas• 8 years ago

There's room for more than one, and it's good to have alternatives to Google-run projects.

hliyan2• 8 years ago

I'm aware of tensorflow.js, but what really struck me with brain.js was this snippet from the very beginning of the readme file:

how to approximate the XOR function using brain.js

  const net = new brain.NeuralNetwork(config);

  net.train([{input: [0, 0], output: [0]},
           {input: [0, 1], output: [1]},
           {input: [1, 0], output: [1]},
           {input: [1, 1], output: [0]}]);

  const output = net.run([1, 0]);  // [0.987]

This is how you win over newcomers -- quick, accessible demonstrations of the product/library's capabilities. A sample is worth a thousand words. Tensorflow may have a lot of great, detailed examples, but its documentation fails in this regard.

hombre_fatal3• 8 years ago

Great point.

This is why I used p2.js for javascript game physics over franken-emscripten Box2d ports.

The readme and source code are extremely accessible (https://github.com/schteppe/p2.js#sample-code).

When I was trying to optimize my collision detection, I stepped in to p2.js source to read narrowphase vs broadphase implementations. Last I used Box2d, I was reading c++ pdf documentation.

spullara• 8 years ago

What is the equivalent in tensorflow.js? Can someone translate?

bluejay23872• 8 years ago

I share the concern about mono-cultures in tech, but if you are serious about getting into data science or AI I have to agree with the OP -- stick to TensorFlow. TensorFlow.js is not a first class citizen of that ecosystem, but its close enough to get real work done.

Also... there are some groups that use Javascript for this kind of work (We use Typescript for our projects), but the vast majority of it is in Python. As much as I dislike that language, it completely dominates AI and data science.

boltzmannbrain2• 8 years ago

if you are serious about getting into data science or AI

Then you won't be using Javascript anyways. Like you said, Python is the way to go: PyTorch, TF, PyMC3, scikit-learn, etc.

orf• 8 years ago

As much as I dislike that language

Can you elaborate why? It dominates AI and data science for a reason

axel18012• 8 years ago

1. Tensorflow.js closely (not exactly) mirrors the python counterpart, and its api's, and thinking. We feel it does not reflect node ideologies well. And not the shify, what is in today is out tomorrow, thinking. The thinking that is practical, and applies well to business tastics. Brain.js started in node, and was original in its way it tackled the problem. Being data first, easy api, and then speed. It just works. 2. The vast majority of machine learning needs are encompassed within the library, and are only getting better. 3. The library can be learned in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months. 4. We can do it faster, simpler, than tensorflow.js. GPU support is coming in NodeJS, but is already partially implemented for browser, with fallback to CPU. 5. Brain.js was measured, where its benchmark was even better than industry standards, including IBM's Watson: https://github.com/jesus-seijas-sp/demo-nlp (note: project uses brain.js). Tensorflow.js isn't mentioned in this link, but I talked with the author about using Tensorflow.js, which he did try for this exact project, and his exact reply was: "with tensorflow.js same implementation I got a 0.91, but taked more time to train with CPU" (complete with typo) 6. Any corporation as powerful as those who maintain tensorflow should not have all the say in something as powerful as machine learning. Everyone should, and can. 7. We choose to.

danielmorozoff• 8 years ago

Can someone comment on performance -- speed vs training vs other frameworks. Most of our work is in TF/Pytorch and I have not used any JS implementations would love to hear some peoples insights into how it compares.

vorticalbox2• 8 years ago

I just did the maths one.

1 to 10 addition, 2000 iterations took about 5 mins on repl.it

It got the maths wrong so will need more training

shados2• 8 years ago

The sample app (the color contrast stuff) hurt my feelings a bit. I used to work on an app that needed to do something similar and I ended up fighting with the YIQ formula (it really doesn't work for a lot of cases). Playing with the sample just a bit and I ended up replicating what had taken me weeks to do back in the days...

axel18012• 8 years ago

This was good, correct? I'd love to hear what your use case was, like which colors didn't work, etc.

shados2• 8 years ago

Haha, sorry if it was unclear, my tone was in jest.

Yeah, basically what Im trying to say is that this is awesome. It was several years ago so I don't have my old code anymore (different job), but it was in the printing industry, where we wanted to warn customers that their choices of color were...dubious.

However, it's extremely subjective. An example is certain shades of red/orange. The formula might tell you that using white text is a bad idea, but they're really the same to read, and white looks better.

One thing I'd have to play around more than my free time allows, but I had to deal with back then, was backgrounds with multiple color. Where it got really tricky is when the text overlaps multiple colors, you have to decide if you're seeing enough of the text that one foreground color is ok, or if it's too much and you have to say "no". It was incredibly tricky to do, especially with things like antialiasing involved. Training a model with that data probably would give much better results than my tweaked formulas of old.

revskill• 8 years ago

JS nails it again even with Neuron Networks. What saddens me in latest years is the direction of library development, where people put more focus on Python instead of Javascript. Javascript is universal, you can reuse your code in both browser, native apps and server. Python ? I don't think so. My dream of "getting the job done" is a universal language, universal ecosystem/libraries. We need universal developers, no need for full-stack developers anymore.

noobiemcfoob• 8 years ago

I am a full stack developer using python for everything but what's in my HTML pages. And I'd replace that javascript with python as soon as it would be viable. Javascript is fine for what it is, but the idea of it as a universal language is gross.

h8hawk• 8 years ago

Yeah! Making poorly designed and "weakly" typed language with enormous WTF's as a universal language! I think if they put more effort on webassembly, market share and library support for js will have a huge dropout. For more universal language how about have a actual sane language other than javascript or even python?

vorticalbox2• 8 years ago

Type script is what will likely take over.

aaaaaaaaaab• 8 years ago

Neuron Networks

This really sets the tone!

We need universal developers, no need for full-stack developers anymore.

What if the “universality” of a developer has less to do with their language of choice, and more with their reasoning and abstraction capabilities?

gammateam• 8 years ago

I couldn't really understand how the JS community is so vibrant in some areas and flocks to libraries every other day, but the python community gravitated around all the big data stuff

Not saying it shouldn't, I just don't get the aberration given the computational resources available today since compute instances mitigate single event loop issues

Is there a JS version of numpy and panda?

edit: yes, there are

https://github.com/nicolaspanel/numjs

https://github.com/StratoDem/pandas-js

axel18012• 8 years ago

Also: https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js

Note: this is what brain.js is shifting over to. It uses the... GPU.

quu• 8 years ago

Great. From this source code, I can find well that the speed is optimized even simple for-loop levels in JavaScript.

Brain.js

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