Ahh, the MNIST database of handwritten digits. I never took an ML course and I was only able to achieve 87% recognition rate 6 years ago for a university software engineering project. I read others achieving 99.9% recognition rates with their ANNs so I wasn't happy with my result. I tried to self-study about ANNs but I found most material to be either too simple or too complicated. I finally found some articles about ANNs (http://visualstudiomagazine.com/Articles/List/Neural-Network...) with code samples in C#, so I'll finally be looking into rewriting my old code to get a better result.