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The Elements of Differentiable Programming

arxiv.org

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Re: The Elements of Differentiable Programming

#11

Post by amelius »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #10
amelius wrote: post #8

Would this be useful for general applications, or just numerical ones?

Your program takes various inputs, does processing and gives you results. To quote the book this applies to programs "including those with control flows and data structures" and are not entirely numerical in the most common sense. Broadly speaking, with AD you can modify the results and the program will spit out the required inputs to get those results.

So if a program's result is "no access", then AD can figure out how you can get access. Sounds like an important hacker tool.

Re: The Elements of Differentiable Programming

#13

Post by [deleted] »

fpgamlirfanboy wrote: post #7

i don't know why people write these things. it's an absolute hodge-podge of theorem/proofs/results/techniques with no unifying theme other than "CALCULUS". so it's a pretty bad math book to actually learn math from (you can always spot a pedagogically unsound math book by its lack of exercises). the book doesn't even have any code in it which is surprising considering it has "programming" in the title. actually i kno…

[deleted]

Re: The Elements of Differentiable Programming

#14

Post by cscheid »

amelius wrote: post #11
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your program takes various inputs, does processing and gives you results. To quote the book this applies to programs "including those with control flows and data structures" and are not entirely numerical in the most common sense. Broadly speaking, with AD you can modify the results and the program will spit out the required inputs to get those results.

So if a program's result is "no access", then AD can figure out how you can get access. Sounds like an important hacker tool.

I mean, “differential cryptanalysis” doesn’t go through AD, but I would be surprised if it’s not possible to get pretty close to a discrete analogue to AD using bit flips instead of differential and abstract interpretation.

Re: The Elements of Differentiable Programming

#15

Post by kelseyfrog »

amelius wrote: post #11
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your program takes various inputs, does processing and gives you results. To quote the book this applies to programs "including those with control flows and data structures" and are not entirely numerical in the most common sense. Broadly speaking, with AD you can modify the results and the program will spit out the required inputs to get those results.

So if a program's result is "no access", then AD can figure out how you can get access. Sounds like an important hacker tool.

Cryptography functions, I'd assume, are purposely non-differentiable.

Re: The Elements of Differentiable Programming

#16

Post by hyperbovine »

fpgamlirfanboy wrote: post #7

i don't know why people write these things. it's an absolute hodge-podge of theorem/proofs/results/techniques with no unifying theme other than "CALCULUS". so it's a pretty bad math book to actually learn math from (you can always spot a pedagogically unsound math book by its lack of exercises). the book doesn't even have any code in it which is surprising considering it has "programming" in the title. actually i kno…

[flagged]

Re: The Elements of Differentiable Programming

#17

Post by fpgamlirfanboy »

hyperbovine wrote: post #16
fpgamlirfanboy wrote: post #7

i don't know why people write these things. it's an absolute hodge-podge of theorem/proofs/results/techniques with no unifying theme other than "CALCULUS". so it's a pretty bad math book to actually learn math from (you can always spot a pedagogically unsound math book by its lack of exercises). the book doesn't even have any code in it which is surprising considering it has "programming" in the title. actually i kno…

[flagged]

> graduate-level introduction to differentiable programming.

go check out any real graduate textbook. what you will find is they all have exercises.

> It's a book for ML researchers. I'm excited to read it. Calm down.

just because the authors claim something doesn't make it true. i'm not wrong - this is not a good pedagogical resource and i would bet a year of my salary (as an ML researcher) that you will in fact not read more than 5% of this book.

Re: The Elements of Differentiable Programming

#18

Post by smallnamespace »

fpgamlirfanboy wrote: post #17
hyperbovine wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> graduate-level introduction to differentiable programming. go check out any real graduate textbook. what you will find is they all have exercises. > It's a book for ML researchers. I'm excited to read it. Calm down. just because the authors claim something doesn't make it true. i'm not wrong - this is not a good pedagogical resource and i would bet a year of my salary (as an ML researcher) that you will in fact not…

It's a good thing you're an ML researcher and not, say, a quant trader then ;)

Re: The Elements of Differentiable Programming

#19

Post by bbor »

fpgamlirfanboy wrote: post #7

i don't know why people write these things. it's an absolute hodge-podge of theorem/proofs/results/techniques with no unifying theme other than "CALCULUS". so it's a pretty bad math book to actually learn math from (you can always spot a pedagogically unsound math book by its lack of exercises). the book doesn't even have any code in it which is surprising considering it has "programming" in the title. actually i kno…

You’re getting hit on a bunch of different things here, but I’d like to focus on two:

  it's an absolute hodge-podge of theorem/proofs/results/techniques with no unifying theme other than "CALCULUS".
I mean, yes…? Maybe I’m a terrible programmer but I’ve never applied calculus to my work in any real way. A book that’s just “calculus applications for software design” seems quite useful, and quite unrelated to teaching “math” in a direct way.

  and it's all fine and healthy and gratifying for you and yourself alone. but i don't think i'd ever imagine to myself "well hmm my organization of these topics is going to be useful for other people i should put it out there for the world to see". but that's just me.
Doesn’t this apply to all books of any kind? How do you know what if you can write a book before you try? I feel like “transcribe papers with a spin on them” is a perfect description of Russel and Norvig’s AI book, and many find it valuable. Is this just a math-specific criticism?

Either way, thanks for the very interested contrarian comment! You’re well spoken and I do love a discussion more than “wow this looks useful”, which is all I was prepared to give.

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