My ongoing series of articles on machine learning
作者： Star
At the end of January 2024, after being influenced by ChatGPT for nearly a year, I suddenly had an idea: as a computer science student, shouldn’t I keep up with the times and start learning about artificial intelligence?
As soon as I thought of it, I acted! I decided to start learning about machine learning. I bought a few authoritative books on the subject, hoping to get started with them.
However, I soon realized that most of the available textbooks, whether real books or video courses, seemed to “assume” that readers already had a graduate-level understanding of mathematics. The books were filled with phrases like “notice that,” “we will skip this proof,” and “it is obvious.” As a high school student without a strong mathematical background, this posed a huge challenge for me—I couldn’t fill in the skipped proofs myself, nor could I “notice” some formulas that seemed “obvious” to the authors.
Through conversations with my friends, I found that many university students also felt that the books on the market were too difficult and the learning curve was too steep, which even led some of them to lose confidence in learning.
In this context, an idea suddenly popped into my mind: why not try creating a course on machine learning? On the one hand, it would be a form of the “Feynman technique”—by writing articles and teaching others, I could also clarify my own understanding of the subject and identify areas where I still had doubts. On the other hand, I could fix the issues I found in the current courses! Writing from the perspective of a high school student would make the content more accessible to beginners, just like myself. This way, I could help many others who, like me, were just starting out in machine learning. I thought this idea was great, so I started my own column and continued to update it over the following year.
I spent countless days and nights understanding the motivations behind algorithms, thinking about how to structure my articles, and going through stacks of drafts to derive mathematical formulas. I revised the content word by word, aiming to make it “better and better.” In each article, I provided detailed background information, complete mathematical derivations, and lively examples to help beginners like me better understand the algorithms. This way, they would not need to search for additional materials, significantly reducing the difficulty of their learning.
A little over a year later, my column is nearly complete, with over thirty articles and a total word count exceeding 300,000. It is published on China’s largest developer community platform, and it has received more than 100,000 views.
Moreover, students and professors from a top-tier university in China have found my column and invited me to give an offline lecture at their university. After the lecture, several students told me that my column had greatly helped them, significantly lowering the difficulty of getting started with machine learning. What I’ve done has not only enhanced my academic abilities but also truly helped others, and that brings me immense happiness!
This semester, I will continue to deepen the content of my column and expand the course system. I will refine the language of my articles and improve the mathematical derivations. I will also translate the content into English and upload it to GitHub. In addition, I plan to turn the column into video courses and post them on YouTube to better assist more learners.
I believe this project has allowed me to truly experience what it means to “shine in the field you love” — identifying a common problem and persistently working to solve it. It has illuminated my own dreams and shed light on the path for others. In the days ahead, I will always maintain this enthusiasm for the world.
