Re:Einsum Is All You Need – Einstein Summation in Deep Learn...
by joppy on Monday February 04, 2019 @07:25PM
(#19082019)
I don't have a problem with using indices for anything, they are fine. Distinguishing upper and lower indices is even better. The exact complaint I have is the implicit sums. For example, a matrix A would be written with one upper and one lower index, which I'll just write as A[i, j]. In einstein (implicit sum) notation, the trace of the matrix is written Tr A = A[i, i]. Is this really better than saying Tr A = Sum[i] A[i, i]?
Anyway, index notation is more of a shorthand for symbolic tensor algebra computations than actual sums. The problem is that when dealing with 2, 3, and 4 index tensors, with co- and contra-variant indexes, it's quite cumbersome to notate which component of a tensor contracts with which component of another tensor, and anything you could come up with would end up looking like index notation. Rarely do you actually mean to sum anything.