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"The most striking difference between Tensorflow and other numerical computation libraries such as numpy is that operations in Tensorflow are symbolic. This is
by RSchaeffer 9y ago
"The most striking difference between Tensorflow and other numerical computation libraries such as numpy is that operations in Tensorflow are symbolic. This is a powerful concept that allows Tensorflow to do all sort of things (e.g. automatic differentiation)"
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but can someone explain how symbolic operations allow automatic differentiation or link me to a good explanation?
- make3 9y ago"Symbolic operations" is a fancy way of saying you build up the full mathematical equations with operator overloading instead of computing the results at each individual steps. Having the full equations then allows to differentiate with regards to a variable of your choice included in that equation
- RSchaeffer 9y agoThat makes sense. Thank you!
- rockyj 9y agoSomething like lazily calculating/evaluating an operation, right?
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y agoYep (from a compilation perspective)
- RBerenguel 9y agoYou can easily differentiate a set of (computer defined) operations formed of composition of standard operations (sums, products, etc), as in, you can define another set of computer operations that is the exact, precise derivative of the first. Wikipedia is a bit dense, but it's explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation