{"id":1068,"date":"2009-12-07T12:42:35","date_gmt":"2009-12-07T18:42:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hunch.net\/?p=1068"},"modified":"2009-12-07T12:42:35","modified_gmt":"2009-12-07T18:42:35","slug":"vowpal-wabbit-version-4-0-and-a-nips-heresy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/?p=1068","title":{"rendered":"Vowpal Wabbit version 4.0, and a NIPS heresy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m releasing <a href=\"http:\/\/github.com\/JohnLangford\/vowpal_wabbit\/tree\/4.0\">version 4.0<\/a>(<a href=\"https:\/\/hunch.net\/~vw\/vowpal_wabbit_v4.0.tar.gz\">tarball<\/a>) of <a href=\"https:\/\/hunch.net\/~vw\">Vowpal Wabbit<\/a>.  The biggest change (by far) in this release is experimental support for cluster parallelism, with notable help from <a href=\"http:\/\/cseweb.ucsd.edu\/~djhsu\/\">Daniel Hsu<\/a>.  <\/p>\n<p>I also took advantage of the major version number to introduce some incompatible changes, including switching to <a href=\"http:\/\/murmurhash.googlepages.com\/\">murmurhash 2<\/a>, and other alterations to cachefiles.  You&#8217;ll need to delete and regenerate them.  In addition, the precise specification for a &#8220;tag&#8221; (i.e. string that can be used to identify an example) changed&#8212;you can&#8217;t have a space between the tag and the &#8216;|&#8217; at the beginning of the feature namespace.  <\/p>\n<p>And, of course, we made it faster.<\/p>\n<p>For the future, I put up my <a href=\"https:\/\/hunch.net\/~vw\/todo.html\">todo list<\/a> outlining the major future improvements I want to see in the code.  I&#8217;m planning to discuss the current mechanism and results of the cluster parallel implementation at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.select.cs.cmu.edu\/meetings\/biglearn09\/\">large scale machine learning workshop<\/a> at <a href=\"http:\/\/nips.cc\/\">NIPS<\/a> later this week.  Several people have asked me to do a tutorial\/walkthrough of VW, which is arranged for friday 2pm in the workshop room&#8212;no skiing for me Friday.  Come join us if this heresy interests you as well \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m releasing version 4.0(tarball) of Vowpal Wabbit. The biggest change (by far) in this release is experimental support for cluster parallelism, with notable help from Daniel Hsu. I also took advantage of the major version number to introduce some incompatible changes, including switching to murmurhash 2, and other alterations to cachefiles. You&#8217;ll need to delete &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/hunch.net\/?p=1068\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Vowpal Wabbit version 4.0, and a NIPS heresy&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,29,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code","category-machine-learning","category-online"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}