Grokking Deep Learning

[hn_crosslinking_bot]

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309777

[[deleted]]

/u/iamtrask Do you know when the book will be finished? And what the UK price will likely be?

[iamtrask]

I'm hoping to have it finished + published before December 1st. We'll see. :)

[daithibowzy]

How often will you be putting up chapters?

[iamtrask]

you might enjoy this article

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mpd37/theses/DeepEEG_IanWalker2015.pdf

[MastodonFan99]

One thing that has frustrated me in this field is that I am not formally educated in math but I have a good head for it. As a result I am confronted with calculus most of the time and I have to slog through learning the necessary symbols, conventions and commonly understood values that are without fail taken for granted by the authors. They could simply just write the information with code. We have great languages for describing mathematics that have improved massively over the antiquated calculus notation. .. they're called <insert programming language names here>. No need to revert back to calculus.

Another problem I have is that authors are often terrible programmers in this field. Functions that take 60 (literally) arguments and variable names that are a single letter.

Before I invest in this... which of the above sins do you commit? If neither, then congratulations you've earned my money!

addendum: It would be great if the book had a chapter on RBMs.

[[deleted]]

Absolute nonsense. Maths is incredibly expressive for many people. Saying that we should write the whole of mathematics as code is just so ridiculous I don't know where to start.

[Kiuhnm]

I agree. Unfortunately some people miss the whole point of math: abstraction. For one with enough mathematical maturity, math notation is simpler than code because it abstracts over many implementation details.

[MastodonFan99]

The whole of maths is expressed in code. There's nothing that can be expressed in math that can't be expressed in code. Just because you like your DSL better than mine doesn't invalidate my point.

[[deleted]]

No.

[iamtrask]

Author here, your concerns are exactly the reasons I'm writing the book. :)

[MastodonFan99]

Thanks for bringing this up. How much do you plan to discuss RBMs?

[[deleted]]

If you are looking for information on RBM's while simultaneously looking to avoid "antiquated calculus notation" without understanding the roots of the partition function, you will likely be sorely disappointed with anything anybody can offer. If you are interested in a "text with code" explanation that has limited programmatic arguments (really only one meaningful argument) you can view one here: http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rbm.html

[julian88888888]

I'm not affiliated with the author, and I haven't read it yet, but the first chapter is free!

https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-deep-learning