Most AI tutorials teach you to copy: clone, run, done. The Workshop is the teaching bench of the Forge, and it works the other way around. Every project here is real, runnable code — small enough to read line by line, documented decision by decision. Because architecture is like the diagram in a geometry proof: it is half the solution before a single line of code runs.
No cloud accounts, no GPU farms. Everything on this bench trains and runs on an ordinary CPU.
Battleship AI — a neural network you can train over coffee
A classic 10×10 Battleship game where the opponent is a convolutional network that learns by playing. It has about 38,000 parameters — thousands, not billions — and goes from random shooting to competent play in five hundred games: under a minute of training on a plain desktop CPU. The network never sees ship positions, only the consequences of its own shots.
The repository ships no pretrained model, on purpose: creating one is the point. The README walks through every place where the “default” answer from a tutorial would have been wrong — why there is no pooling on a 10×10 board, why the input is a fog of war rather than the board itself, why hard rules are masked out instead of learned, and what the reward numbers do and do not control.
More projects will join the bench.