Author here. The theoretical background can be found in: https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.2650 https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01285 http://therisingsea.org/notes/MScThesisJamesClift.pdf As neel_k notes, a good way to understand this picture is in terms of differential linear logic (a refinement of simply-typed differential lambda calculus). I did not provide references in the talk as unfortunately I did not understand the subj…
I find this stuff fascinating, at least in the application of differential calculus to things I thought non-continuous, differential grammars, differential regex, etc. It seems like operating in the discrete domain was fine for small problems where problems could be brute forced, but if we want to get into an analytical regime for larger problems, differentiation is akin to recursion/induction in that it allows us to…
I think it is more about error propagation: you can’t estimate which inputs to an algorithm contribute more to the final error, without some notion of derivative of an algorithm with respect to its inputs (even if those inputs are discrete, so that making infinitesimal variations does not obviously make sense).