3 Tips for Beginners

1. The Fastest Way to Learn BrainShop is to Play with It!

BrainShop is delivered with a set of documentation. Reading the documentation is helpful. However it's not enough. We strongly recommend you try out each feature by yourself when reading through the documentation.

If you haven't, create a Free brain and start playing with it now. Keep in mind using BrainShop is free. You don't have to pay us until you publish the brain in a production environment. You can even choose to use it for free forever. In short, you'll never be charged for your learning of BrainShop.

This is an outline of things you can do with BrainShop workspace.

  1. Creating brains
  2. Train brains
  3. Working with cells
  4. Working with nerves*
  5. Working with codes*
  6. Discovering weak cells
  7. Reviewing logs
  8. Tweaking settings

* Note: You can learn nerves and codes at a later stage. See Tip 3 below.

Besides the first one, creating brains, the tasks are organized with tabs, as you might have seen below.

  Training Cells Nerves Codes Discovery Logs Settings

When building the brain, you will use Training and Cells. After publishing it, you will use Discovery and Logs frequently. As virtually all of the tasks involve cells, we recommend you allocate more time to play with cells.

2. The Best Starting Point is Training

Training is the most essential yet simplest tool included with BrainShop. It helps you perform the daily tasks below in an efficient way.

  • Verifying if your brain works as expected.
  • Customizing your brain by teaching it to answer questions.

Training is also a perfect learning tool. By using it, you can learn

  • When to add or edit a cell, and how.
  • What BrainXML expressions and elements look like and how they work

Learning by example is an easy way to learn BrainXML for the most people.

3. Feel Free to Skip Advanced Features

BrainShop provides everything you may need to build and run an engaging A.I. If you're daunted by with its rich features, you may want to know the fact that more than 90% of application can be done without using advanced features such as custom nerves or custom codes.

Furthermore, more than 95% of cells simply consist of a pair of Input/Output fields. This means you can easily get started by working with simple cells. You can safely ignore the Advanced fields until you find yourself ready to build something such as contextual input or conditional output.