You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

skeptical_lurker comments on The Extraordinary Link Between Deep Neural Networks and the Nature of the Universe - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: morganism 10 September 2016 07:13PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (21)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 11 September 2016 01:42:04PM 3 points [-]

This might make some sense if DNNs were being used to further our understanding of theoretical physics, but afaik they're not. They're being used to classify cat pics. SInce when do you use polynomial Hamiltonians to recognise cats?

These properties mean that neural networks do not need to approximate an infinitude of possible mathematical functions but only a tiny subset of the simplest ones

No finite DNN can approximate sin(x) over the entire real numbers, unless you cheat by having a sin(x) activation function.