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Differentiable programming is hardly a "subfield" it can be explained in a paragraph if you know calculus well. If there is any subfield, it's in researching sp
by bsdpufferfish 3y ago
Differentiable programming is hardly a "subfield" it can be explained in a paragraph if you know calculus well. If there is any subfield, it's in researching specific compiler optimizations.
- nonagono 3y agoWell clearly not, since at least 100 pages of content here are specifically about differentiable programming and not prerequisites :) More seriously, it's about doing the impossible. Formally, some functions are nondifferentiable, period. But it would be cool if we could actually "more or less" differentiate them. For that we'll necessarily need a bag of tricks which is now coalescing into "techniques" and "principles". Cf. numerical analysis. It takes a page or two to set up your definitions and show that many functions are badly conditioned, period. And yet we still want to compute them, so we've been building the bag of tricks for almost a century now.
- bsdpufferfish 3y ago> not prerequisites Almost the entire document is undergrad numerical topics (finite difference methods, maximum likelihood, Jacobins, hessians, newtons method, etc). This is all well covered material that is soundly not research.
- fpgamlirfanboy 3y agohey look someone that actually knows what they're talking about!