mnist (http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/) is the traditional
set for testing neural network implementations.  mnist8m
(http://leon.bottou.org/papers/loosli-canu-bottou-2006) is a variant of
the original mnist training set augmented with deformations.

=== INSTRUCTIONS ===

--- starting from raw pixels ---

  * make mnist.test.confusion
      this will download the mnist training and test sets
      train a neural network model on mnist from raw pixels
      evaluate on the original mnist test set and report a confusion matrix
      results in test errors: 216 out of 10000
        disk requirements: about 10 megabytes
        training time requirements: about 5 minutes on 1 core
        memory requirements: less than 256 megabytes

  * make mnist8m.test.confusion
      this will download the mnist test set and the mnist8m training set
      train a neural network model on mnist8m from raw pixels
      evaluate on the original mnist test set and report a confusion matrix
      results in test errors: 126 out of 10000
        disk requirements: about 2 gigabytes
        training time requirements: about an hour on one core
        memory requirements: less than 256 megabytes

--- pixel n-grams ---

  * make mnistpng.test.confusion
      this will download the mnist training and test sets
      train a model on mnist linear in pixel n-grams
      evaluate on the original mnist test set and report a confusion matrix
      results in test errors: 175 out of 10000
        disk requirements: about 10 megabytes
        training time requirements: about a minute on 3 cores
        memory requirements: less than 256 megabytes

  * make mnist11png.test.confusion
      ibid with 1 neural network hidden unit ("goes to eleven")
      results in test errors: 162 out of 10000
        disk requirements: about 10 megabytes
        training time requirements: about 3 minutes on 3 cores
        memory requirements: less than 256 megabytes

  * make mnist8mpng.test.confusion
      this will download the mnist test set and the mnist8m training set
      train a model on mnist8m linear in pixel n-grams
      evaluate on the original mnist test set and report a confusion matrix
      results in test errors: 124 out of 10000
        disk requirements: about 2 gigabytes
        training time requirements: about an hour on 4 cores
        memory requirements: less than 256 megabytes

  * make mnist8m11png.test.confusion
      ibid with 5 neural network hidden units ("goes to eleven")
      results in test errors: 83 out of 10000
        disk requirements: about 2 gigabytes
        training time requirements: about an hour on 4 cores
        memory requirements: less than 256 megabytes
