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Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

It is only me who gets frustrated by networks drawn upside-down (i.e. data flowing from down to up? IMHO it is a poor convetion, mindlessly repeated.

In English we read from top to bottom. Data flows (be it equations or flow charts) typically follow the same convention, so we can read articles in in a coherent way. Even trees (both data structures and decision trees), grow from their roots downwards (so, against their original biological metaphor). At least most of researchers write neural networks from left to right, consistent with English.

More of this point: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/6j28t9/d_w...

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(One could probably make a comedic genre out of the type of comments that get voted to the top of the average hn thread...)

Context? (https://xkcd.com/1085/)

I generally prefer to see neural networks depicted so that the input is on the left and the output is on the right. This is probably because I think of time on an axis as flowing left to right.

Data flowing down seems upside down to me. Don't know why; maybe I just got used to it.

I wonder if it could be from 2D graphs where the starting point (0,0) is always at the bottom left. Or it could be that in the physical world we tend to start things at the bottom and work up (like a building, or stairs). Or maybe Microsoft Windows where you literally start in the bottom of the screen and work your way up.

Except that the first thing I do with my new Windows images is drag that damn thing to the top of the screen so that menus drop -down- like they're supposed to dammit lol

There is also the convention of the pyramid, with greater order as you go up and chaos at the bottom. Not exactly parallel to this network, but I do picture the tip of the pyramid as the output.

Another way that this "upside down" way works for me is that this isn't water flowing downhill, it's being pushed up with every layer of the network adding energy or input.

Finally there's the metaphor of the roots of a plant being under the fruit of the plant.

(I didn't read the reddit post, apologies if it's a duplicate or these examples are addressed there.)

There are probably others who get frustrated, but I don't think most people do.

I think its fine, and I haven't heard others complain about it over the years.

> their original biological metaphor

say root network

forward and back usually refer to right- and leftwards in 2D so it should probably be drawn left-to-right

It's not clear what you mean.

- top->bottom is not compatible with left->right - "back" propagation is "back" for a reason, so it should go against the normal (forward) direction

E.g. in Feynman diagrams time flows forwards from left to right.

Only in cultures whose writing system reads left-to-right. :)

math is generally written left-to-right

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