[Chicago] Python for AI?

[Joshua Herman]

Dear Lewit,
Functional programming isn't important in AI. There are plenty of AI
programs that are programmed in imperative style. It just happened
that Lisp was a functional language and people used it to implement AI
concepts. Right now it seems like most scientists are using either R,
Python or Matlab , Also, in deep learning a bunch of the libraries are
implemented in Python .
Sincerely,
Joshua herman


On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 9:55 PM, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
> Thanks Thomas.  I'll look into these links.  I know that AI specialists are
> attracted to functional programming.  Lisp is the oldest of the functional
> languages, but I believe Python is pretty flexible because it supports
> different paradigms, including the functional paradigm.  Of course.... the
> next question is, "Why is functional programming so important in AI?"
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 5:09 PM, Thomas Johnson <thomas.j.johnson at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I think perhaps your prof is not covering modern history in machine
>> learning. I don't think LISP is very common in AI anymore. The ML world is
>> dominated mostly by Python, R, and Matlab as high-level languages and C++
>> for low-level work (with maybe some FORTRAN for really hard-core math
>> routines).
>>
>> In fact, I would say Python is probably one of the leading AI languages,
>> probably even the top language when combined with C++ (although there's a
>> lot of cutting-edge statistical stuff that's still only available in R or
>> Matlab). For example, Theano (http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/) is a
>> widely-used library for Deep Learning, and Google's new TensorFlow
>> (https://www.tensorflow.org/) has bindings for C++ and Python. Plus of
>> course there's Scikit-Learn (http://scikit-learn.org/). There's even a whole
>> python distribution (https://www.continuum.io/why-anaconda) whose sole
>> purpose is to get you set up quickly for data science work in Python.
>>
>> That's just a handful of the tools available in Python
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 4:59 PM Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> I'm taking an AI class at Northeastern.  Interesting class, but sadly no
>>> programming in the class.  More a survey course covering the history and
>>> some of the algorithms of AI.  However, the prof wants us to write a paper
>>> on AI that's due some time in April.  We're free to choose whatever topic we
>>> want, as long as it's related to AI.  Something that might be fun to write
>>> about is Python for AI.... maybe?  I know that LISP is usually the language
>>> of choice for AI research, and I've been playing around with Lisp lately
>>> using the Clozure CL IDE.  Definitely a nice language, although it will take
>>> me a couple more days to get comfortable with Lisp's prefix notation.  But
>>> what about Python?  Does anyone on this list have any experience with Python
>>> for AI?  Can you recommend any books or websites or articles?  If so, please
>>> let me know.
>>>
>>> Thanks for your help!
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Douglas.
>>>
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>>
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