Quote: Original post by landagen
I disagree with that statement. Code provides an interactive example of a theory in action. This is vital to understanding something. By writing their code and using their example and then debugging their work you can most definitely learn and understand their implementation. From there, it is typically easy to understand other peoples implementations and to be able to come up with your own. To say you can't learn from code is like saying you can't learn by example.

Being able to code a technique doesnt mean you learned it. Thats the best way of joining the huge bandwagon of people coding neural networks and yet that have absolutely no idea of what they are doing. If you understand something well enough, then coding becomes trivial, NOT the other way around.

You don't get AI programming experience unless you actually design and program AI yourself. If you take someone else's implementation without learning how to do it yourself you'll have no idea what to do when there are slight variations in the problem. Ideas are much more reusable than implementations.

Quote: Original post by landagen
Code provides an interactive example of a theory in action.

There is absolutely nothing 'interactive' about "cut and paste".

Quote: To say you can't learn from code is like saying you can't learn by example.

Reading someone elses code will typically only give you insights as to why they made certain implementation choices if you already understand the theory. Invariably, those people asking for code are just looking for the easy way out. They couldn't understand the theory, let alone how to translate it into code, so they assume that seeing the finished result of someone elses work will magically enlighten them as to both the theory and the process. This simply doesn't happen in practice. The effort spent deciphering the code and understanding the theory hidden in it is far greater than what is required to sit down and read the theory (and to ask questions in forums like this one when you don't understand it).