I took the latest version of the Microsoft CTNK (Computational Network Tool Kit) out for a test drive. CNTK is basically a command line program that does deep neural networks.

Installing CNTK is just a matter of copying a bunch of files to your local machine. The install comes with a couple of demos including one named Simple2D which I ran.

Three of the data lines are:

|labels 0 1 |features -1 -0.11
|labels 0 1 |features -1 -0.1
|labels 1 0 |features -1 -0.09

You can imagine this as:

(x=-1.00, y=-0.11) label=red
(x=-1.00, y=-0.10) label=red
(x=-1.00, y=-0.09) label=blue

And so the goal is to predict color (red or blue) from x and y.

The CNTK tool appears to be very complex. To use it you must write a fairly complicated configuration file that uses a proprietary language called BrainScript (which was in the demo).

Anyway, very interesting and very good fun. I’m sure I’ll be exploring CNTK more over the next few months.