Sure 🙂 GLSL is really neat. It’s kind of what makes all this cool impressive graphics stuff possible IMHO. Like I said I don’t know for sure that Cycles is directly using it or is directly based on it. Its quite possible that there is an abstraction layer in between allowing both GLSL and other implementations under the hood, though as I mention I’d be quite surprised if an understanding of GLSL doesn’t pretty directly translate into understanding the internals of the node trees.
I made a post here: https://cgcookie.com/t/1101-retopography-and-ai
regarding a project I hope to do using Blender. Most likely it will be largely in Python, however, using tensorflow but that is just speculation as I have a lot of research to do before deciding for certain on a language and toolkit (or even if I do want to pursue this path)
