I have been watching a lot of cowboy movies and reading a lot of stories about the Wild West. Yesterday I got the idea that it might be fun to get a lever-action rifle to hang on the wall. We constantly hear how easy it is to purchase guns in the United States and so I thought it would be an easy process. It turns out that purchasing a rifle is a lot more complex than I thought. It leads me to believe that people pushing for stricter gun laws have no idea how tough the process actually is. Yes, there are shortcuts, the most glaring one being purchasing one from a private seller.
I am a huge fan of the Second Amendment here in the United States but have never owned a gun. I have often joked about how easy it is to get one in Utah and that we sell them in convenient stores here. That can't be farther from the truth. I read through the process and quickly wondered why people are pushing for more and more gun control. This reminded me of what happened the first I tried a few machine learning experiments.
When I first started playing with machine learning I thought it would be as simple as finding the right algorithm, putting in some training data, and then pulling out some magnificent results. Then I tried my first exercise and realized that the bulk of the work turned out to be massaging the training data into the right format. Then I cycled through a number of different algorithms to figure out which one provided the closest results only to discover that some don't produce consistent values. Finally I had to figure out how to take a trained model and turn it into a production system.
Ultimately I have found that it is not enough to read about doing something, especially technical tasks. In order to truly understand the task at hand, you have to run through the process. It is not enough to read the instructions, you have to pull out your tools and run through the steps yourself.
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