Book Image

50 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know - Second Edition

By : Imran Ahmad
4 (5)
Book Image

50 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know - Second Edition

4 (5)
By: Imran Ahmad

Overview of this book

The ability to use algorithms to solve real-world problems is a must-have skill for any developer or programmer. This book will help you not only to develop the skills to select and use an algorithm to tackle problems in the real world but also to understand how it works. You'll start with an introduction to algorithms and discover various algorithm design techniques, before exploring how to implement different types of algorithms, with the help of practical examples. As you advance, you'll learn about linear programming, page ranking, and graphs, and will then work with machine learning algorithms to understand the math and logic behind them. Case studies will show you how to apply these algorithms optimally before you focus on deep learning algorithms and learn about different types of deep learning models along with their practical use. You will also learn about modern sequential models and their variants, algorithms, methodologies, and architectures that are used to implement Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. Finally, you'll become well versed in techniques that enable parallel processing, giving you the ability to use these algorithms for compute-intensive tasks. By the end of this programming book, you'll have become adept at solving real-world computational problems by using a wide range of algorithms.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Fundamentals and Core Algorithms
7
Section 2: Machine Learning Algorithms
14
Section 3: Advanced Topics
20
Other Books You May Enjoy
21
Index

Transformers: the evolution in neural networks after self-attention

Our exploration into self-attention revealed its powerful capability to reinterpret sequence data, providing each word with a contextual understanding based on its relationships with other words. This principle set the stage for an evolutionary leap in neural network designs: the transformer architecture.

Introduced by the Google Brain team in their 2017 paper, Attention is All You Need (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762), the transformer architecture is built upon the very essence of self-attention. Before its advent, RNNs were the go-to. Picture RNNs as diligent librarians reading an English sentence to translate it into German, word by word, ensuring the context is relayed from one word to the next. They’re reliable for short texts but can stumble when sentences get too long, misplacing the essence of earlier words.

transformer-self-attn

Figure 11.7: Encoder-decoder architecture of the original transformer

Transformers...