Handy Google Colab notebook for Character Level RNN exercise (Lesson 7)

TLDR; here is the link to the modified notebook — https://drive.google.com/open?id=1i_WW1ciOWG0gCPgskaUrDxgq4Rd730wp

This blog post is for people who are doing Udacity’s PyTorch Scholarship Challenge course: Deep Learning with PyTorch.

In Lesson 7, we learn about RNNs and try to do character generation based on Anna Karenina. This exercise requires access to a GPU. Since not many of us do not have a GPU, a good and free alternative is Google Colab.

So, I created this notebook with all the modifications required so that you can run this on Colab directly. Here are the brief steps:

1. Download the modified Notebook from this link
2. Visit Google Colab
3. You will be prompted with a modal, select Upload
4. If modal doesn’t appear and instead if it opens a new Notebook, then from menu File > Upload Notebook
5. Upload the modified notebook
6. That’s it!

Now you can focus on completing the exercise instead of worrying about how to download the images etc.

If you are interested in knowing changes I have made:

1. Install PyTorch v.0.4
2. Set the Runtime to GPU, so that GPU is enabled
3. Download the Anna Karenina text and place it in data folder correctly

Hope this helps! If you have got any issues with running this notebook, then feel free to message me on Slack for any help. My slack username is avinash

All the best for the exercise!