Ode on a Neural Network
Thou still unraveled shape of silicon,
Thou child of data and electric thought,
Digital historian, who canst thus express
A mathematical tale more sweetly than our prose:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts thy tensored depths
Of vectors or of nodes, or of both,
In virtual space or clouded matrices?
What parameters dance in what hidden layers?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to compute?
What matrices of backpropagation?
How cold are those cold gradients, how sparse
The lonely nodes that never can decode
Their ancient patterns; and how blank the space
Where each new epoch brings a fresh cascade
Of weights adjusting to some distant truth
That floats beyond our human comprehension's reach!
O atrous convolution! fair display
Of mathematical beauty born anew
With every forward pass - yet still we gaze
In wonder at thy deep complexity.
Heard algorithms are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft transformers, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of backprop:
Fair function, beneath the nodes, thou canst not leave
Thy gradients, nor ever can those trees
Be pruned; bold Optimizer, never, never canst
Thou kiss thy target, though thou draw'st so near!
Yet do not grieve; she cannot fade, thy love
Frozen in checkpoints time cannot destroy.
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to human-kind, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
Of deep learning's vast and boundless dream.