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Re:Differentiable Programming Mega-Proposal by mlevental on Thursday September 05, 2019 @09:52PM (#20892328)
I don't understand? It's a piecewise differentiable function and you maximize how you maximize any such function: do gradient ascent where it's differentiable and compare against values at the boundary points (ie start, end of interval and points at which there's a removable discontinuity).
Re:Differentiable Programming Mega-Proposal by chillee on Friday September 06, 2019 @12:59AM (#20893205)
I don't disagree that a gradient exists. As the other commenter commented, the gradient/subgradient will usually exist.

What I'm arguing is that this gradient will not allow you to optimize anything of interest for the vast majority of programs.

Re:Differentiable Programming Mega-Proposal by alexmlamb on Friday September 06, 2019 @12:44AM (#20893137)
Yeah sometimes this is called a "subgradient".