A lot of problems boil down to optimizing a cost function. This function could be the error in recognizing cat pictures or the likelihood of recommending a movi

A lot of problems boil down to optimizing a cost function. This function could be the error in recognizing cat pictures or the likelihood of recommending a movie to a user. What people want is an easy way to express these functions so that a computer can optimize it for them. Tensorflow allows people to do just that, it lets you represent your mathematical equation in a way that can be analyzed and optimized by a computer. It does it by exposing various mathematical operations that it understands[1]. As long as you can express your mathematical function using these operations then Tensorflow knows how to compute it efficiently and you can use its optimizer to find the optimal inputs. comes in handy for a lot of problems. [1] https://www.tensorflow.org/api_guides/python/math_ops https://www.tensorflow.org/api_guides/python/math_ops