It is common to add an extra term to the cost function, proportional to the size of the weights. This is equivalent to constraining the size of the weights, so that they do not grow out of control. Constraining the size of the weights means that the weights cannot grow arbitrarily large to fit the training data, and in this way reduces overfitting.
We will measure the size of the weights using the so called L2-norm, meaning our cost function becomes:
$$ \mathcal{C}(\theta) = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N \mathcal{L}_i(\theta) \quad \rightarrow \quad \frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N \mathcal{L}_i(\theta) + \lambda \lvert \lvert \boldsymbol{w} \rvert \rvert_2^2 = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N \mathcal{L}(\theta) + \lambda \sum_{ij} w_{ij}^2,$$
i.e. we sum up all the weights squared. The factor \( \lambda \) is known as a regularization parameter.
In order to train the model, we need to calculate the derivative of the cost function with respect to every bias and weight in the network. In total our network has \( (64 + 1)\times 50=3250 \) weights in the hidden layer and \( (50 + 1)\times 10=510 \) weights to the output layer (\( +1 \) for the bias), and the gradient must be calculated for every parameter. We use the backpropagation algorithm discussed above. This is a clever use of the chain rule that allows us to calculate the gradient efficently.