[Bug-gnubg] The little engine that could... Neural Network

[Robert Fontaine]

I scrolled back through the archives and it seems like it has been a
while since gnubg got smarter.

I have always suspected that the only thing holding gnubg back was an
obscene amount of compute.
A large single model should be able to outperform a bunch of essentially
disconnected specialized ones, ala snowie.
IFF the learning is deep enough and long enough.  Connecting backgames,
and containment with early game
play should/might/could happen.

I've been building a little compute node in my basement,  a few xeon
phis boards and a xeon 8 core processor and thinking
that if the models were ported to openmp or openacc and tweaked a bit we
might find a corporate sponsor with
heavy metal to run them.   Intel is pushing the Xeon Phi architecture
pretty heavily; could be they might lend us some
cpu time.   Amazon, google, Baidu... bound to be someone with some
cycles out there.

Who is the neural networks guru in residence?  Where do I look for the
docs,pseudo code,scribblings?  
I'm at the "Going to Take the Andrew Ng" course point in the project but
I'm pretty good at assembling and porting things.
Hopefully, by the time I have code familiarity I might actually have
some current knowledge that can be applied to the real challenges.

R , pynum, pymic have both been ported to run on the intel/mic libraries.  
Intels C/C++ compiler and vtune are available for students and the Phi's
are cheap like borscht for establishing a development environment/sandbox.

I've been scrounging hardware for the better part of a year at this
point but I'm within spitting distance of booting and getting Centos
installed.
Would like to use this as a stepping stone to doing some Kaggle contests
and generally getting my data analysis, machine learning chops.

Thanks for any thoughts or suggestions,
Robert