At MIT, I learned about RNNs in my NLP class with Prof. Michael Collins. He built a model from my keystrokes to predict who I was. To me, it felt like a magic box. Years later, when I had to teach RNNs, I forced myself to go inside the box. Download: t.co/pD5gFhOrpr

First, with a tiny example on paper by hand.

Then, a slightly larger one in Excel.

That’s when it finally clicked: The weights are reused (weight matrices on the left side)

The hidden states are passed down (H's)

When I built it by hand and saw everything visually, it clicked, just math you can actually trace.

Now I try to give others the same “aha!” moment I had. Download Excel: t.co/pD5gFhOrpr