Jack McKew's Blog

Building an AI That Learns to Throw Darts - Frame by Frame

Posted by Jack McKew on Mon 09 March 2026 in Software • Tagged with canvas, animation, reinforcement-learning, node-canvas, ffmpeg, cross-entropy-method, javascript • 6 min read

I wanted to make a short-form video where an AI visibly learns a physical skill from scratch - starting terrible, converging to competent. Darts felt perfect: there's a clear target, a throwing motion with real biomechanics, and enough parameters to make the "learning" look genuine. The result is a 9:16 …

Things I Learnt Becoming a Cave Diver

Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 30 October 2025 in Principles • Tagged with principles • 4 min read

I've spent 6 months this year living in Mexico to learn Spanish but also to become a full cave diver! This has been a life changing experience which I'll forever hold close to my heart. I can honestly say I chased my dreams and achieved them, beyond proud of myself …

Reinforcement Learning in Unity

Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 22 August 2024 in Python • Tagged with python, machine learning, ai • 6 min read

I find machine's working automatically to complete a task one of the most fascinating things, imagine how good it feels to watch a machine that learns to do the task on it's own! Especially if you're the teacher, in this blog post, we're going to go through:

How to set …

ML Agents for Unity on Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3)

Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 25 July 2024 in Python • Tagged with python, machine learning, ai • 3 min read

If you're like me, you found this blog post likely after struggling to get ML agents set up and working a Mac M1/M2/M3, here's hoping what I found that works for me, works for you!

Clone the ml-agents repo

Ensure you have the ml-agents repo cloned locally! This …

Reinforcement Learning with PyTorch

Posted by Jack McKew on Tue 19 March 2024 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation, machine learning, ai • 3 min read

In our final exploration into machine learning with PyTorch, we're going to do something critical for lifeforms in our world, learn to walk!

This post took many trials and errors, a form of reinforcement learning I completed unsupervised as a human. The resulting code below was what ended up working …

Classifying Images with PyTorch

Posted by Jack McKew on Mon 26 February 2024 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation, machine learning, ai • 9 min read

Neural networks are something you hear about constantly in the world of machine learning, so in this post we're going to build, train and test a neural network to classify images with PyTorch! We will be using the CIFAR-10 dataset (CIFAR stands for Canadian Institute for Advanced Research), and it's …

Recurrent Neural Networks with PyTorch

Posted by Jack McKew on Wed 07 February 2024 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation, machine learning, ai • 11 min read

Weather affects every single human on earth for the better or worse, and we've come to rely on weather predictions in order to plan how we spend our day. But how can we predict the weather? In this post we're going to develop a machine learning model with recurrent neural …

Combining Machine Learning Models in Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 21 September 2023 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation, machine learning, ai • 3 min read

Now that we've built & trained logistic regression and decision tree models to classify the iris dataset in these previous posts:

We found that they were both really good in their own regard (potentially overfitting), but what if we had two models …

Decision Tree Classifiers in Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Tue 15 August 2023 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation, machine learning, ai • 1857 min read

What are decision trees? It's a tool to assist with making decisions, in a tree like structure, similar to a flow chart; where each branch of the tree is a decision, usually made with some boundaries that decide which branch to follow. A basic decision tree could be of a …

Logistic Regression with PyTorch

Posted by Jack McKew on Sun 06 August 2023 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation, machine learning, ai • 17 min read

In this post we'll go through a few things typical for any project using machine learning:

Data exploration & analysis
Build a model
Train the model
Evaluate the model

While this is a very high level overview of what we're about to do. This process is almost the same in any …

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