Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: a faster neural-network activation function

Author: Landon Rabern

Date: 09:56:08 06/05/01

Go up one level in this thread


On June 05, 2001 at 08:21:16, Jim Bell wrote:

>On June 04, 2001 at 19:00:55, Landon Rabern wrote:
>
>[SNIP]
>>
>>I have done some testing will a neural network evaluation in my program for my
>>independent study.  The biggest problem I ran into was the slowness of
>>calculating all the sigmoids(I actually used tanh(NET)).  It drastically cuts
>>down the nps and gets spanked by my handcrafted eval.  I got moderate results
>>playing with set ply depths no set time controls, but that isn't saying much.
>>
>>Regards,
>>
>>Landon W. Rabern
>
>In case you are still interested, you might want to consider what I assume is a
>faster activation function: x/(1.0+|x|), where x is the total weighted input to
>a node. I read about it in a paper titled "A Better Activation Function for
>Artificial Neural Networks", by D.L. Elliott.  I found a link to the paper (in
>PDF format) at:
>
>   "http://www.isr.umd.edu/TechReports/ISR/1993/TR_93-8/TR_93-8.phtml"
>
>I should warn you that I am certainly no expert when it comes to neural
>networks, and I haven't seen this particular activation function used elsewhere,
>but it shouldn't be too difficult to replace the tanh(x),
>and see what happens. (Of course, you would also have to change the
>derivative function as well!)
>
>Jim

Interesting, I will have to try this.  The curve is not as smooth as the tanh,
but unlike the standard 1/(1+e^-x) it does output on -1,1.  The derivative will
be something like 1/(1+x)^2 but then need to take into accoutn the absolute
value.  I don't see a way off hand to use the original activation function to
produce the derivate quickly, but there must be a way.

Regards,

Landon W. Rabern



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.