Basic Setup
If you’re following along using real candy, you’ll need:
- at least two out of the following: peanut M&Ms, plain M&Ms, skittles, jellybeans (note: you can also use other types of candies that are small and approximately round); for each, a small snack-sized bag is enough!
- a few sheets of letter (or A4) sized paper
- a pen
Computational Setup
Some of the advanced exercises involve writing software code. For this, you’ll need a working computer, with the programming language and its interpreter/compiler set up. The example code uses Python and the associated scientific computing stack (numpy, scipy, Jupyter, pandas, scikit-learn), which you can download, for example, as part of the Anaconda distribution. If you have your own candy, you can record your own training data as an electronic table. If you don’t have your own, you can download the [pre-recorded data][sweet_data]: on that website, right-click on the button called “raw” and use the “Save Data as” option to save the file to your computer.