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Comment by sdrothrock | Hacker News Reader

ahh, sorry for the misunderstanding.

Does the network do well with handwriting, e.g. puzzles that have been half-solved?

Well I wasn't going to spill the beans just yet but if you promise to keep a secret.. working on that for v2 :)

Edit: Although so far I've learned that some people have VERY bad handwriting. I'm having a hard time sanitizing a dataset because I can't even tell what digit they were trying to write

I'm that guy. Sorry :(

I have the worst handwriting.

People are like, "Dude, wtf?" when I try to whiteboard stuff.

All good; validates that I'm at least on the right track! Had to pare back my ambitions quite a bit to get _something_ finished before the iOS11 launch.

I didn't expect the reception to be so enthusiastic for v1 tbh; but I guess I chose a good place to call it an "MVP"

I'm really interested in the growth of ML on mobile apps. Did you test the ability to call existing ML APIs in the cloud and found they weren't responsive enough, or did it just feel more natural to run the net locally?

I've played with AWS Rekognition a little bit. It's definitely WAY faster to do it on-device. Plus it works even in Airplane mode.

I'm running the iOS11 Vision stuff, my own text recognition CoreML neural network (81 times per loop), plus all the ARKit stuff and I can still get 30-60 fps on my iPhone 7+

Do the standard datasets not work too well (e.g. MNIST or NIST)?

http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~tijmen/affNIST/

https://www.nist.gov/srd/nist-special-database-19

Tried those first but no, they didn't work great with the data I was able to extract; those datasets are only handwritten digits which apparently weren't close enough to the computer printed ones.

I think the artifacts from the square borders (eg if it's slightly mis-cropped or misaligned) were also tripping up the model before I had my custom dataset loaded in there.

Edit: I should say this was my first stab at doing machine learning so I may be missing something; definitely open to ideas or suggestions!

Shouldn't you be able to generate a lot of synthetic "printed-looking" digits very easily? Just get say 20 common fonts and render each digit with random rotations and scaling etc.

That's definitely on my list of things to try! Thanks for the push in that direction

There shouldn’t be a need for that. All the info information you need to solve it all come with the puzzle.

They want to recognize the handwriting to give the player feedback on errors made.

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