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I like the writing style of this essay. The end of the first paragraph is particularly funny. But to fulfill my contractual obligations for gratuitous criticism
by hyperpallium 7y ago
I like the writing style of this essay. The end of the first paragraph is particularly funny. But to fulfill my contractual obligations for gratuitous criticism as a HNer:
It "uses" calculus only tangentially, and I see simulated annealing and optimization as a computational techniques, not mathematics.
Also but one must be the highest (the “global optimum”) is not neccessarily true; several can be equally highest, e.g. a sine wave.
- kmundnic 7y agoI agree that saying that he used calculus is a bit of a stretch. However, calculus is essential for all the gradient-based methods (or algorithms) in optimization. Moreover, if you want to analyze these algorithms, you have to know about convex analysis. I think what the author _meant_ was that he used the intuition derived from calculus to tackle the problem he was framing as a mathematical optimization problem. Also, you're right, he missed that the global maximum might not be unique in a non-concave function.