Re:The Spiral Language
by brianberns on Friday July 13, 2018 @09:52AM
(#17522973)
Thanks for the response. I always thought that the point of "making everything symbolic" is that you can differentiate a symbolic expression and thus implement backpropagation automatically. No? How do you handle this in Spiral?
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Re:The Spiral Language
by abstractcontrol on Friday July 13, 2018 @11:53AM
(#17523992)
Yes, it is, but there exist an alternative approach called automatic differentiation which is more imperative and flexible in nature than symbolic differentiation.
The idea is to keep a tape (you can think of it as a list) and then record all the operations on it as you step forward through the program. Then at the end you execute the operations backwards from the tape.
I take this approach in Spiral's ML library.