We often hear that machine learning models "learn patterns in data". But what does that actually look like in geometry? If you dropped a little elastic mesh into a cloud of points and let it learn, how would it fold itself to match the shape of the data? In this scene we watch a self-organizing map...a simple unsupervised neural model...learn the shape of a two-dimensional dataset arranged in a spiral arm. On top of this, we lay down a square grid of neurons whose weights live in the same plane. At the start, this grid is just a flat net floating across the cloud...it knows nothing about the structure underneath. Learning is a repeated game: pick a random data point, find the neuron whose weight is closest, and then nudge that neuron and its neighbours toward the point. Do this again and again, while slowly shrinking how far the neighbourhood influence spreads. #MachineLearning #ManifoldLearning #UnsupervisedLearning #NeuralMaps #GeometricML