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Proof of Corn

proofofcorn.com

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Re: Proof of Corn

#111

Post by Yeroc »

bluGill wrote: post #95
Yeroc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you spend time on the website you can see the plan is to rent (only!) 5 acres of land for this project. Since it's a lease only and such a small plot it seems unlikely to get him into trouble. Given the small size though I'm dubious he'll find it easy to get any custom operators interested in doing a job that small!

You can find such custom operators - but those are not deal made over the internet, they are made in person with a handshake. Generally the cost to get all the equipment there is - in a good year - all of your possible profit for something that small. Tractors are slow on the road. Once the tractor is there the implement needs to unfold (best case - worse case your combine header is pulled in via a separate truck and…

Agreed. Growing up on a small farm (~1120 acres) our garden alone was probably at least 5 acres in size. It's laughably small, the only way he'll succeed is for a neighbouring farmer to take pity on him.

Re: Proof of Corn

#112

Post by bayindirh »

santadays wrote: post #86
embedding-shape wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These experiments always seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top, seemingly breaking down the idea behind the experiment in the first place. Seems better to spend the time and energy on finding better ways for AI to work hand-in-hand with the user, empowering them, rather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible. That whole part fe…

> I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you. I think this is the new turing test. Once it's been passed we will have AGI and all the Sam Altmans of the world will be proven correct. (This isn't a perfect test obviously, but neither was the turing test) If it fails to pass we w…

Researchers love to reduce everything into formulae, and believe that when they have the right set of formulae, they can simulate something as-is.

Hint: It doesn't work that way.

Another hint: I'm a researcher.

Yes, we have found a great way to compress and remix the information we scrape from the internet, and even with some randomness, looks like we can emit the right set of tokens which makes sense, or search the internet the right way and emit these search results, but AGI is more than that.

There's so much tacit knowledge and implicit computation coming from experience, emotions, sensory inputs and from our own internal noise. AI models doesn't work on those. LLMs consume language and emit language. The information embedded in these languages are available to them, but most of the tacit knowledge is just an empty shell of the thing we try to define with the limited set of words.

It's the same with anything we're trying to replace humans in real world, in daily tasks (self-driving, compliance check, analysis, etc.).

AI is missing the magic grains we can't put out as words or numbers or anything else. The magic smoke, if you pardon the term. This is why no amount of documentation can replace a knowledgeable human.

...or this is why McLaren Technology Center's aim of "being successful without depending on any specific human by documenting everything everyone knows" is an impossible goal.

Because like it or not, intuition is real, and AI lacks it. Irrelevant of how we derive or build that intuition.

Re: Proof of Corn

#113

Post by Windchaser »

formerly_proven wrote: post #108
dsjoerg wrote: post #78

"Can AI grow corn?" Let's step back. "there's a gap between digital and physical that AI can't cross" Can intelligence of ANY kind, artificial or natural, grow corn? Do physical things? Your brain is trapped in its skull. How does it do anything physical? With nerves, of course. Connected to muscle. It's sending and receiving signals, that's all its doing! The brain isn't actually doing anything! The history of human…

It's extremely funny to me but this is basically the literal premise of season two of Person of Interest. Yeah d'uh it's just a computer how would it actually do anything ? Well it just goes ahead and tells people to do stuff and wires them money. Easy.

Though a computer could also just control robots that actually plant, weed, water, and harvest the corn. That's a pretty big difference from just 'coordinating' the work.

An AI that can also plant corn itself (via robots it controls) is much more impressive to me than an AI just send emails.

Re: Proof of Corn

#114

Post by 9rx »

bluGill wrote: post #35
treis wrote: post #6

It's cute but it seems like it's mostly going to come down to hiring a person to grow corn. Pretty cool that an AI can (sort of) do that autonomously but it's not quite the spirit of the challenge.

There is more than that. He needs to decide which corn seed to plant (he is behind here - seed companies run sales if you order in October for delivery in mid march). He needs to decide what fertilizer to apply, and when. He needs to monitor the crop - he might or might not need to buy and apply a fungicide. He needs to decide when to harvest - too early and he pays a lot of money to dry the corn (and likely money to…

There are plenty of CCAs out there that will happily do all those things for you. If hiring someone to come work the field is fair game, surely that is too?

Re: Proof of Corn

#116

Post by roywiggins »

jayd16 wrote: post #11

I'm not a huge fan of these experiments that subject the public to your random AI spam. So far it's bothered 10 companies directly with no legal authority to actually follow up with what is requested?

Even the blog post reads like it was written by AI.

Re: Proof of Corn

#117

Post by aaln »

Really cool - even cooler if some farming related hardware on a designated plot of land can be setup so it's more than an ai agent finding someone to hire via apis.

Re: Proof of Corn

#118

Post by patmcc »

marcd35 wrote: post #110
lukev wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. This whole process still appears to have a human as the ultimate outer loop. Still an interesting experiment to see how much of the tasks involved can be handled by an agent. But unless they've made a commitment not to prompt the agent again until the corn is grown , it's really a human doing it with agentic help, not Claude working autonomously.

Why wouldn't they be able to eventually set it up to work autonomously? A simple github action could run a check every $t hour to check on the status, and an orchestrator is only really needed once initially to set up the if>then decision tree.

That still doesn't seem autonomous in any real way though.

There are people that I could hire in the real world, give $10k (I dunno if that's enough, but you understand what I mean) and say "Do everything necessary to grow 500 bushels of corn by October", and I would have corn in October. There are no AI agents where that's even close to true. When will that be possible?

Re: Proof of Corn

#119

Post by aprilthird2021 »

treis wrote: post #6

It's cute but it seems like it's mostly going to come down to hiring a person to grow corn. Pretty cool that an AI can (sort of) do that autonomously but it's not quite the spirit of the challenge.

Also what's the delta b/w Claude Code doing it and you doing it?

I would have to look up farm services. Look up farmhand hiring services. Write a couple emails. Make a few payments. Collect my corn after the growing season. That's not an insurmountable amount of effort. And if we don't care about optimizing cost, it's very easy.

Also, how will Claude monitor the corn growing, I'm curious. It can't receive and respond to the emails autonomously so you still have to be in the loop

Re: Proof of Corn

#120

Post by ks2048 »

"Every decision will be logged. Every API call documented." ...

So, where are the exact logs of the prompts and responses to Claude? Under "/log" I do not see this.

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