“It’s like Hinton diagrams, but for the terminal.”

Which of the two matrix representations below would you rather be looking at?

Hinton diagrams are often used for visualising the learnt weights of neural networks. I’ve often found myself trying to imagine what the weights look like. And fortunately for me today, I remembered this project by GitHub’s Zach Holman.

Turns out, overriding the way NumPy represents numbers wasn’t too hard, so I hacked myself a cool little solution. The code’s here for the time being, until I spin it off into it’s own little repo.

Enjoy!

EDIT: The code is now in my theano_toolkit repository. Check it out!

@misc{tan2014-05-04,
  title        = {“It’s like Hinton diagrams, but for the terminal.”},
  author       = {Tan, Shawn},
  howpublished = {\url{https://blog.wtf.sg/2014/05/04/terminal-hinton-diagrams/}},
  year         = {2014}
}