Oren Zeev-Ben-Mordehai zbenmo

Set up geospatial scientific Python with Miniconda on Windows

Anaconda is an excellent, simple way to get Python up and running on your computer. But, it includes a lot of packages you'll never use but consume gigs and gigs of hard drive space. Instead, you can just install miniconda and then choose the individual packages you need. The steps below explain how to do this to set up a Python environment for geospatial data science. These steps are Windows-specific, but the same process works on Mac or Linux (just don't download the wheels from Gohlke - conda/pip install them directly). If you're having trouble, here are more detailed instructions on getting geopandas and geospatial Python up and running.

Install Miniconda

Download the Miniconda for Python 3.5 installer
Install miniconda to C:\Anaconda and set it as the system's default Python

	Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
	----------------------------------
	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
	Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD

	""" Trains an agent with (stochastic) Policy Gradients on Pong. Uses OpenAI Gym. """
	import numpy as np
	import cPickle as pickle
	import gym

	# hyperparameters
	H = 200 # number of hidden layer neurons
	batch_size = 10 # every how many episodes to do a param update?
	learning_rate = 1e-4
	gamma = 0.99 # discount factor for reward