Machine learning - python implementations

Arthur Samuel has defined in 1959 Machine Learning as "the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed". This post will be the first of a series of posts regarding different machine learning algorithms. For each algorithm I'll present first a theoretical overview of the algorithm and then I'll present a practical implementation of the algorithm in Python and some examples to demonstrate the usage of the algorithm implementation. The ultimate goal will be to implement a Pong game in Python and then use Machine Learning techniques to teach each paddle of the Pong game how to play. The programming will be done in the Windows environment with Python 2.6, numpy 1.6.1, pygame 1.9.1 and finally matplotlib 1.1.0. This work was inspired by the excellent 2011 Stanford online course on Machine Learning provided by Professor Andrew Ng. You can find his course available online on the OpenClassroom.