For years the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition has been the king of the classroom but a project called HERMES OPTIMUS by ExploratoryStudios has given this classic device a modern upgrade: artificial intelligence.
ExploratoryStudios didn’t use cloud servers or Wi-Fi to make this happen. Instead they wrote a custom neural network in TI-BASIC, the TI-84’s native programming language. This is no small feat for a calculator with a 15 MHz processor and 24 KB of RAM – hardware more like a pocket calculator than a modern smartphone. Yet HERMES OPTIMUS runs directly on the TI-84, catching misspelled words and offering corrections with about 85% accuracy. It uses a feedforward neural network with a 4-60-12 setup – four input neurons, sixty hidden neurons and twelve output neurons tied to a small dictionary of target words.
Creating this neural network required smart trade-offs. They limited the scope to a select group of words, likely the ones students misspell the most in class. Each word is converted into numerical inputs – four neurons’ worth – that capture its traits. These feed into the hidden layer for heavy computation, the output layer gives a probability for each correct word. The calculator even shows a confidence score so you know how sure it is of its suggestion. Training the network on the TI-84’s hardware would have taken years so they trained it on a separate computer, optimized the model for the calculator to run inferences without memory issues and kept it fully self-contained.
Why put a spell-checker on a graphing calculator? It seems as odd as teaching a wrench to whistle. But the project’s brilliance is in its creativity. By writing a neural network in TI-BASIC ExploratoryStudios proves complex algorithms can run on decades old hardware. It’s a lesson in resourcefulness, you don’t need cutting edge GPUs to dabble in AI.
At 85% accuracy, it isn’t (yet) competitive with modern spell-checkers on laptops or phones. The small dictionary and simplified neural network limits it to a narrow set of words and it’s not even perfect there. But perfection isn’t the point. HERMES OPTIMUS is a proof of concept, AI can run on hardware most would call ancient. It’s also a nod to the TI-84 community where students and hobbyists have been turning calculators into platforms for creativity for years – from games to now artificial intelligence.
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