
Boolean Circuits are Neural Networks - matt_d
https://constantinides.net/2019/04/26/boolean-circuits-are-neural-networks/
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rwmj
Is this novel? I remember reading about this in the 1980s - it was called
"connexionism" but was basically the same.

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analognoise
Hah, NO! I'm getting a kick out of people rediscovering this stuff too, with
changed names, and thinking they're on the forefront!

It's hilarious; like AI found a whole new crop of people, but ones that aren't
serious enough to do the background reading.

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jszymborski
I think this this pretty unnecessarily (and uncritically) dismissive of this
work.

Sure, this work hasn't sprung from the primordial academic goop without
influence, but the authors of this paper embraced old ideas to get faster and
sparser FPGA implentations of neural nets. We have something now that we
didn't before.

The vague ideas were there, but parallel progress in other domains have
brought us to the point where we're able to take principles, put them into
practice, and learn from them.

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antpls
From my knowledge, this is what I understood :

This result could lead to task-specific neural networks implemented at the
hardware circuit level. This is one step further than quantization and should
allow to further reduce energy consumption and accelerate inference time for
some specific neural networks.

Would this be even more performant than a dedicated tensor accelerator (such
as TPU) ?

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Matumio
Yes from a hardware point of view, custom look-up tables are much cheaper than
multipliers. On the other hand, the point seems to be to utilize the LUTs of
FPGAs which are not very power-efficient because they also need to be fully
programmable. In theory you could hard-code the weights of a network into an
ASIC, or even just a new generic building block that is cheaper than
multiplication. This would then be near impossible to beat, if anybody can be
bothered to optimize for this architecture.

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russfink
Another reference, from 2004. [https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Boolean-
Neural-Network...](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Boolean-Neural-
Networks-Kohut-Steinbach/1c472945ab2970a709efe97f81d9a5e7bf37baae)

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master_yoda_1
I hope you have cited this article
[http://karpathy.github.io/neuralnets/](http://karpathy.github.io/neuralnets/)

