SwiftSafari is a projectc that aims to provide an introduction to data science concepts and the Swift programming language through building various tools from scratch. These tools include neural networks, genetic algorithms, and more.
The project is designed to be a follow-along project, meaning that you can work through the code examples and exercises alongside the accompanying blog posts and videos to get a deeper understanding of the concepts being covered.
You can find my full tutorials and explanations on my medium blog oceanexplains.medium.com
Swift is such a spectacular language — easy to learn, highly functional, open-sourced — but people too often associate it with iOS development and fail to see its potential beyond iOS app development. To be fair, the language most comparable to Swift, Python, has such an extensive collection of features and packages that it’s hard not to want to dive into all of that. With Swift, you don’t get as diverse an ecosystem (yet!), but you DO get so much— an impossibly accessible user interface, package manager, and more!
There are tons of free resources too for learning Swift, check those out here (scroll down!). I want to help make this language more accessible for data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence projects and so I’m putting together a project I’m calling Swift Safari where we will be building up all the tools from scratch so that we can gain an intuitive understanding of them.
If this sounds interesting to you, hop on board and get ready to build a virtual world filled with organisms that learn and evolve, and watch an ecosystem of your design take you on a developer journey like you’d never imagined! You can start at the beginning here!
In this project, we will start by building a simple neural network, evolutionary algorithm, graphic ecosystem, and a user interface to wrap it all up! This is just the beginning, because you will be able to take it even further with your own modifications.
To get started with SwiftSafari, you can either follow along with oen of the project tutorials at oceanexplains.medium.com, or you can clone the project. You'll need to have either Xcode or Swift Playgrounds installed on your machine. Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for building apps for macOS, iOS, and other Apple platforms. You can download Xcode and Swift Playgrounds for free from the Mac App Store.
Once you have Xcode installed, you can clone the SwiftSafari repository to your local machine, or download the project as a zip file and then unzip it.
I have included Playground projects that correspond to the individual tutorials. These are like checkpoints along the road and can be run independently to see what a given implementation looks like. The Xcode project is where I do my active development and I am still learning version control with GitHub so please be patient (thanks!)
Contributions to SwiftSafari are welcome and encouraged! If you notice a bug, have an idea for a new feature, or want to improve the documentation, feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.I really just want to ghelp grease the gears and get Swift chugging along the data science train!
SwiftSafari is licensed under the Chicken Dance License. License is included in the project folder entitled "License." In short, engage your inner chicken because it's time to dance! Dance instructions are located in the License folder in file entitled "DANCE."