Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

tensorflow.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 211 posts

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#132

Post by amelius »

Fede_V wrote: post #87
kragen wrote: post #8

This is really significant. At this moment in history, the growth of computer power has made a bunch of important signal-processing and statistical tasks just feasible, so we are seeing things like self-driving cars, superhuman image recognition, and so on. But it's been very difficult to take advantage of the available computational power, because it's in the form of GPUs and clusters. TensorFlow is a library design…

One small note on the paper itself. I love that the paper's author are in alphabetical orders, without any stupid jostling over first/last authorship. I think that's fantastic and wish academia went that way too (yeah right).

I think that is usual for any large project. Take for instance the papers published by CERN.

Also consider that a single "order" might not make any sense. How do you determine if somebody "contributed" more than anybody else?

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#133

Post by jordigh »

cmarschner wrote: post #114
jheriko wrote: post #70

i really wish people would stop calling multidimensional arrays tensors. there is already well defined language for this. multidimensional array is fine, psuedotensor is fine. tensor is confusing if you have any previous background with tensor calculus before the word became machine learning flavour of the month. still. this does look pretty cool overall. processing large volumes of data is becoming increasingly less…

Can't agree more. The first time I looked up tensors when they appeared in Torch I got totally confused by the description of tensors used in physics.

The problem is complicated a bit more because physicists use the word "tensor" to mean a tensor field, i.e. a collection of tensors on which calculus makes sense.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#134

Post by benmathes »

Found a mistake in the docs:

http://tensorflow.org/get_started/basic_usage.md

In the "Variables" example, looks like a variable name got changed but not updated everywhere:

    # at the start:
    var = tf.Variable(0, name="counter")

    # then:
    one = tf.constant(1)
    new_value = tf.add(state, one)
    update = tf.assign(state, new_value)
The variable "state" should be the variable "var", or vice-versa.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#135

Post by jordigh »

zer0nes wrote: post #128
jheriko wrote: post #70

i really wish people would stop calling multidimensional arrays tensors. there is already well defined language for this. multidimensional array is fine, psuedotensor is fine. tensor is confusing if you have any previous background with tensor calculus before the word became machine learning flavour of the month. still. this does look pretty cool overall. processing large volumes of data is becoming increasingly less…

Tensor is a much better term than multidimensional array: - It's not as verbose - The concept of tensor has linear algebra operations associated with it while multidimensional array is just a programming term without any attached Math operations.

> The concept of tensor has linear algebra operations associated with it while multidimensional array is just a programming term without any attached Math operations.

But that's the precise problem. The multidimensional arrays that programmers call "tensors" do not generally have the operations defined on them that you would expect from a tensor, such as index contraction, tensor products, or differentiation. At the same time, a tensor is different from an array, just like a number is different from its decimal representation. These distinctions are important when you want to change the basis, a very useful and frequent operation for both tensors and numbers.

Then again, this battle was already fought and lost for vectors, which programmers specialised to mean "arrays" instead of meaning "elements of a linear space".

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#136

Post by revelation »

Fede_V wrote: post #87
kragen wrote: post #8

This is really significant. At this moment in history, the growth of computer power has made a bunch of important signal-processing and statistical tasks just feasible, so we are seeing things like self-driving cars, superhuman image recognition, and so on. But it's been very difficult to take advantage of the available computational power, because it's in the form of GPUs and clusters. TensorFlow is a library design…

One small note on the paper itself. I love that the paper's author are in alphabetical orders, without any stupid jostling over first/last authorship. I think that's fantastic and wish academia went that way too (yeah right).

I realize the jostling going on, but I personally appreciate that I can tell from the order of names who to contact with inquiries.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#140

Post by Someone »

revelation wrote: post #136
Fede_V wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One small note on the paper itself. I love that the paper's author are in alphabetical orders, without any stupid jostling over first/last authorship. I think that's fantastic and wish academia went that way too (yeah right).

I realize the jostling going on, but I personally appreciate that I can tell from the order of names who to contact with inquiries.

That isn't that simple, as there is a cultural component in the order authors are listed (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_authorship#Order_of...)

Also, at CERN, with papers with 1000+ authors, any chance of picking the 'right' name from the list approaches zero, anyways. Such papers typically list a "corresponding author" to whom to send inquiries.

Alphabetic order also gave us the fun Google search phrase "Does G. Aad exist?" (Gives a link to https://jeffollerton.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/does-gaad-exis..., but Google also suggests a correction to your "typo")

Post reply on HN