A Physicist’s View: The Thermodynamics of Machine Learning

Complex systems are ubiquitous in nature, and physicists have found great success using thermodynamics to study these system. Machine learning can be very complex, so can we use thermodynamics to understand it?

Tim Lou, PhD
Towards Data Science
8 min readApr 18, 2022

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What does water going downstream and machine learning have in common? Both are minimizing something, and the analogies run deeper than you might think (Credit: Appolinary Kalashnikova)

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Data Scientist @ TTD | ex Researcher @ Berkeley/LBNL | Particle Physics PhD @ Princeton | Podcast @ quirkcast.org