News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Gradient Descent by n2d4 on Sunday July 30, 2023 @06:48AM (#36929834)
What would you search for, the zero/root in the derivative? Imagine the derivative is a function like y=x^2-eps with some small eps, say 0.000001. For binary search like that to work, you need to start with two values x1 and x2 such that sign(y1) != sign(y2). But with the derivative above those values are hard to find with random initialization.

More generally, for binary search to find a value x such that f(x)=0, we need to have f(any value less than x)<0 and f(any value greater than x)>0. We can't guarantee these properties for general derivatives.

Re:Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Gradient Descent by jdthedisciple on Sunday July 30, 2023 @07:03AM (#36929922)
> What would you search for

I imagine you could search until the incremental change between your current and last result is below some threshold epsilon, as a kind of stopping criterion.

Re:Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Gradient Descent by frankreyes on Monday July 31, 2023 @05:36AM (#36940376)
IEEE 754 is by default limited by 64 bits, so yes.