By the way: It works, try it ;)
If I may, let me suggest you add a note about your future plans to add backpropagation using Excel/Libreoffice macros, which "might allow users to train large-scale models from scratch within their lifetime."
This though: hearty chuckles were produced. (The paper was was even type-set in LaTeX!)
Not sure how academic papers are written normally, but do such papers normally refer to open source licenses as "Commie"? And does anyone know what the paper/project was created for?
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2. http://oneweirdkerneltrick.com
3. A sort of analog neural net using a biological substrate to perform communication and learning. Basically, I've trained some wild dogs I found in the alley behind my apartment for function approximation. Originally I had intended to use a pretty standard hill-climbing approach, but they kept wandering away when I ran out of treats. My new method arranges them in a series of layers for PAC (provably all canine) learning, with the gradients transmitted by bark-propagation. I've not figured out how to implement convolutional operations in this framework yet, so I might hold off on publishing anything this year.
It's kind of funny, I guess.
But I didn't assume it was a farce. I was genuinely excited to see the implementation, because there is something unique about the transparency and interaction you can have with an excel workbook. It's almost like a GUI for a lisp REPL. Even if I am too dumb to understand the actual c code, I can see the relevant numbers being crunched, how they relate, and more.
So... "good one. you got me."
But even as I sit here as the butt of the joke, I find myself wishing your link had been sincere.
'Excel is a trademark of Microsoft, we believe'
Every time I've used Excel for a complex problem I've regretted it. Even simple things like joins using VLOOKUPs are incredibly clunky and error prone.
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