Investigate the DCNN idea

[ujh]

There's some free DCNN data out there. Maybe it's worthwhile to try to integrate it into the bot. Especially as a new prior once the prior calculation has been move into a separate thread (issue #233).

[ujh]

Even though there are caffe bindings for Rust it seems that installing caffe is quite a big issue. It seems that the better solution would be to convert the trained DCNN to Tensorflow file format (see also here).

[iopq]

But how to use Tensorflow? Are there Rust bindings for that? I got caffe to compile on my VM

[ujh]

Both solutions aren't ideal. If it were up to me I'd have a solution that doesn't require an external library. To be honest though, I haven't checked either solution yet. I assume if we do either we loose the statically linked binaries and Windows support will probably be even worse. 👎

[iopq]

It's not really worse, it's just "feature not supported on Windows"

considering it's not supported on Windows OR Linux right now it would be an improvement to implement it

[ujh]

Ha! That's a way to look at it. 😁

I don't even know how that would work though. But it's something to figure out. I mean, ideally the executable would check at runtime if it can load the library (e.g. Caffe) and then either turn on that feature or not. This way we could keep the prebuilt executables. Otherwise we would need to use some kind of conditional compilation. I assume that exists in Rust too.

[iopq]

There are bindings for tensorflow to Rust ( https://github.com/ajtulloch/tensorflow-rs ) but there are no binaries for Tensorflow for Windows either.

[ujh]

Now with Google entering the game I think it's finally time to seriously investigate this.

1. Figure out if it's possible to statically link the caffe library. That way we have at least standalone binaries.
2. Only build in this feature for platforms that are actually supported by Caffe.

[ujh]

Maybe it would be worthwhile to investigate Leaf and see if we can't use that instead.

[iopq]

investigated, not usable until they have a serialization format (which they'll have eventually)

[ujh]

Thanks. Maybe they'll have one once we get around to actually implementing this. 😝