
Show HN: LambdaNet – A functional neural network library written in Haskell - jbarrow
https://github.com/jbarrow/LambdaNet
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jdiez17
Thanks for sharing this. I've been interested in Haskell for a while and I
hadn't really started writing any actual programs until very recently[1]. I
also wanted to learn about neural networks, and reading your source code was
quite pleasant. It looks really interesting, congratulations.

[1] I wrote a toy IRC bot for a channel I have with some friends. It's quite
primitive.
[https://github.com/jdiez17/HaskellHawk](https://github.com/jdiez17/HaskellHawk)

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coolsunglasses
This looks really cool. Are there any papers that describe neural networks
that function in a manner similar to how this library works?

~~~
boothead
There are a really great soup to nuts explanation of implementing neural nets
in Haskell in issue 21 of the monad reader
[http://themonadreader.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/issue214.p...](http://themonadreader.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/issue214.pdf)

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jokoon
off-topic question: is it possible to speed up a neuron network software using
a gpu or specialized hardware running openCL ? what about using supercomputers
?

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jbarrow
Actually, that's exactly how they speed up neural networks, especially deep
neural networks. Andrew Ng showed that they could run the Google Brain on COTS
GPUs for about $21,000 [1].

You can experiment with this yourself using a package like Theano (Python) [2]
or Caffe (C++) [3].

[1] [http://cs.stanford.edu/people/ang/?news=stanford-team-
develo...](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/ang/?news=stanford-team-develops-
commerical-off-the-shelf-deep-learning-system) [2]
[http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/](http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/)
[3] [http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org](http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org)

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im3w1l
Looks very nice! May I ask how fast it is?

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jbarrow
It's reasonably fast, as it uses HMatrix for linear algebra -- HMatrix relies
on BLAS rather than native Haskell for all the matrix and vector math.

