<story><title>Lessons Learned Reproducing a Deep Reinforcement Learning Paper</title><url>http://amid.fish/reproducing-deep-rl</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Radim</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Switching from experimenting a lot and thinking a little to experimenting a little and thinking a lot was a key turnaround in productivity. When debugging with long iteration times, you really need to pour time into the hypothesis-forming step - thinking about what all the possibilities are, how likely they seem on their own, and how likely they seem in light of everything you’ve seen so far.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not to glorify by-gone days, but isn&amp;#x27;t there a certain charm to having to wait your turn to plug punch cards into a mainframe?&lt;p&gt;Having a &amp;quot;single shot&amp;quot;, with long iteration cycles, indeed does something strange to the way you approach programming and bugs and program design.&lt;p&gt;Anecdote: my long iteration cycles were caused by my mom restricting access to my C64. I filled page after page (paper!) with code, anxious for any chance to try it. I like to think I learned something during these &amp;quot;mental dry runs&amp;quot;…&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;On topic&lt;/i&gt;: I wrote a rant about the &amp;quot;Mummy Effect&amp;quot; of trying to reproduce ML papers (which we do regularly): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rare-technologies.com&amp;#x2F;mummy-effect-bridging-gap-between-academia-industry&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rare-technologies.com&amp;#x2F;mummy-effect-bridging-gap-betw...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmorris</author><text>In my first programming class (1981) - FORTRAN! - we keypunched cards, handed them to a clerk to run, and waited hours for the results. We learned to be careful and to think things through. But nothing like Knuth...&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;When I was at Stanford with the AI project [in the late 1960s] one of the things we used to do every Thanksgiving is have a computer programming contest with people on research projects in the Bay area. The prize I think was a turkey.&lt;p&gt;[John] McCarthy used to make up the problems. The one year that Knuth entered this, he won both the fastest time getting the program running and he also won the fastest execution of the algorithm. He did it on the worst system with remote batch called the Wilbur system. And he basically beat the shit out of everyone.&lt;p&gt;And they asked him, &amp;quot;How could you possibly do this?&amp;quot; And he answered, &amp;quot;When I learned to program, you were lucky if you got five minutes with the machine a day. If you wanted to get the program going, it just had to be written right. So people just learned to program like it was carving stone. You sort of have to sidle up to it. That&amp;#x27;s how I learned to program.&amp;quot; [0]&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.softpanorama.org&amp;#x2F;People&amp;#x2F;Knuth&amp;#x2F;index.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.softpanorama.org&amp;#x2F;People&amp;#x2F;Knuth&amp;#x2F;index.shtml&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Lessons Learned Reproducing a Deep Reinforcement Learning Paper</title><url>http://amid.fish/reproducing-deep-rl</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Radim</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Switching from experimenting a lot and thinking a little to experimenting a little and thinking a lot was a key turnaround in productivity. When debugging with long iteration times, you really need to pour time into the hypothesis-forming step - thinking about what all the possibilities are, how likely they seem on their own, and how likely they seem in light of everything you’ve seen so far.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not to glorify by-gone days, but isn&amp;#x27;t there a certain charm to having to wait your turn to plug punch cards into a mainframe?&lt;p&gt;Having a &amp;quot;single shot&amp;quot;, with long iteration cycles, indeed does something strange to the way you approach programming and bugs and program design.&lt;p&gt;Anecdote: my long iteration cycles were caused by my mom restricting access to my C64. I filled page after page (paper!) with code, anxious for any chance to try it. I like to think I learned something during these &amp;quot;mental dry runs&amp;quot;…&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;On topic&lt;/i&gt;: I wrote a rant about the &amp;quot;Mummy Effect&amp;quot; of trying to reproduce ML papers (which we do regularly): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rare-technologies.com&amp;#x2F;mummy-effect-bridging-gap-between-academia-industry&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rare-technologies.com&amp;#x2F;mummy-effect-bridging-gap-betw...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ssivark</author><text>As they say, &lt;i&gt;a few days in the laboratory might save a few hours in the library!&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, &lt;i&gt;a few days of doing might save a few hours of thinking.&lt;/i&gt; :-)</text></comment>