Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance Paris. 1848-1859

A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions.

Elements of Learning

In chapter 1, we cover the elements of learning machines. In chapter 1.1, we explain how programmers interested in building learning machines must make the same jump from Aristotle's deterministic, propositional logic to that of Laplace's stochastic, probabilistic logic. In chapter 1.2, we construct probabilities with tensors following torch.Tensor, accelerating them with vector processors, and build probability distributions on top of those tensors following torch.distributions. In chapters 1.3 and 1.4, we cover inference with a linear modeling assumption, and the linear algebra computation needed to carry out such inference, following torch.linalg and cuBLAS. The elements of learning machines covered in chapter 1 will provide the foundation needed to train deep neural networks in chapter 2, following torch.nn, torch.optim, and cuDNN.