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I've complained about this sort of thing too (usually more privately). The upside is supposed to be precision and concision, but as you point out in this case t
by abecedarius 10y ago
I've complained about this sort of thing too (usually more privately). The upside is supposed to be precision and concision, but as you point out in this case they spent all their concision on buying precision. For this precision I think code should be considered more often instead of the usual informal math notation, which sometimes gets sloppy and harder to follow from outside the author's research community. (Edit: I'm not accusing that passage of sloppiness, but it's a problem that's frustrated me before with math in place of code.)
- nojvek 10y agoI will dance around the day someone figures our an AI to translate papers into readable code that compiles into a nice jupyter like notebook format. Some papers are quite easy to comprehend and truly ground breaking e.g the CNN paper by Alex and Hinton. Some like this are like "WTF are you even trying to say?"
- reader5000 10y agoCode will be hard to follow outside of the particular language's community. There are efforts to standardize pseudo-code, but then you're basically back to math notation.
- Tarq0n 10y agoCode has the advantage that functions and operators are googleable, while mathematical notation is not. I think the search problem is a fairly serious issue for maths actually.
- abecedarius 10y agoAnd the even greater plus of being runnable. If it's confusing/ambiguous to you, you're not stuck.
- reader5000 10y agoTrue, but it's not maths' fault Google and OSs dont support copy/paste for notation. Also, if you have to google e.g. the expectation operator you probably shouldnt be reading research papers in theoretical machine learning.