imetallica
Hello folks, is anyone working on a machine learning library of sorts for Elixir/Erlang?
I think that with the upcoming changes to the BEAM, specifically the work on a JIT, and the easy to use of GenStage and Flow, maybe it would become a viable solution to do number crunching (and I really mean maybe).
Yes, I’m aware that the BEAM at the current state is not good for such things as number crunching, but, well as this recent talk from Lukas Larsson on EEF17 has given me hope of a faster numeric Erlang. 
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bzhr
I feel this old (2009) stackoverflow thread on numerical computing in Erlang is relevant to the topic. I also think that the main feature of a language to be suitable for ML is vectorization, is Elixir good for vectorization of computations?
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entone
Garret Smith has been working on a system that wraps the Tensor Flow python libraries and implements an Erlang system around monitoring the processes. Check out http://guild.ai
ericsteen
Let’s keep in mind that supervised learning is only one approach to ML, and backpropagation (the heaviest number crunching part of Deep Learning) is falling out of favor. DL is not very scalable, and Unsupervised Learning (i.e. Reinforcement Learning) seems to be expected to be the key path to AGI (artificial general intelligence) — according to Richard Sutton and others
With that in mind, I have been successfully using Matrex for high-dimensional vectorized computation for Multi-Armed Bandits (Elementary Reinforcement Learning). You can check it out here. Its part of The Automata Project. Down the road I may need to use python or julia via erlports (or maybe even docker containers as used here) for the vectorized parts, but for prototyping, things are going well so far.
In my view, Neuroevolutionary Typology and Weight Evolving Artificial Neural Networks (TWEANN) with Novelty Search is one of the most promising alternative approaches, and Elixir has a head start in this sub-field of ML thanks to Gene Sher’s book.
As far as python interop goes, something like this looks pretty appealing for scaling ML as well.
The Automata Project is seeking contributors if anyone here is interested.
MartinElvar
Interesting talk, it seems however that BEAMJIT has been on its way for a long time.
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ericsteen
You should check this out. It looks pretty appealing for scaling ML using Poolboy.