karpathy / karpathy/micrograd

An Alternative Approach: Recursive Backpropagation Without Topological Sorting

Open
#91 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
Jupyter Notebook
Stars
17.6k
Forks
2.8k
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Very intuitive and simple, @karpathy! I was coding in parallel while watching your video and took a slightly different approach.

- For computing gradients of `+` and `*`, I used the fundamental derivative formula:

$$ L = \lim_{h \to 0} \frac{f(a+h) - f(a)}{h} $$

- Instead of using **topological sorting** for backpropagation, I implemented a **recursive approach**, where each parent node checks its child nodes and calculates gradients accordingly. While this method is probably less efficient—as it can recompute gradients for child nodes multiple times when gradients flow from multiple paths—it still serves as a valid alternative that produces the same results.

Link to my repo:
https://github.com/wahabaftab/micrograd/

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.