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GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

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Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#271

Post by darkstarsys »

nicf wrote: post #107
rakel_rakel wrote: post #29

> I don't think researchers in math/TCS will be made obsolete, but I think it will instead no longer make sense to work on any low-hanging, or even medium-hanging (you know what I mean) fruit. We'll be needed for problems where actual novel approaches are needed. I wonder how this compares to what we see happening with "juniors" in software development? In math research, do you also get the training for the professio…

I was trained as a mathematician and worked as a math researcher for a little while (now working as a private tutor), and based on my experience I'd say this description is basically right, with one extra wrinkle. In order to get a Ph.D., you have to do some sort of original research, so in that sense you're working on "previously unsolved stuff" basically right from the start. But that doesn't entail doing anything…

Indeed. Perhaps my article here will be of interest to some: https://blog.oberbrunner.com/blog/ai-math-as-humanities/

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#272

Post by alexpotato »

xeromal wrote: post #180
alexpotato wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so advanced that it's just as readable to me as Greek I used to feel this way about statistics. The language and terms are hard to understand and many of the formulas are taught as "just memorize this" instead of building up from first principles. But then I started using statistics to analyze something I cared a lot about (paintball) and I quickly realized it's like learning anything new: - there is jargon - and c…

I gotta know what you use stats for regarding paintball. I haven't played in years but I loved playing back in the tipman 98 custom era (not sure if that's still a popular marker).

So I wrote a whole bunch about college paintball statistics here: https://www.pbnation.com/showthread.php?t=3949120

Then I wrote some more about pro paintball stats in the below three Reddit posts:

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/paintball/comments/1h17f2m/intro_to...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/paintball/comments/1jy5xqp/paintbal...

3. https://www.reddit.com/r/paintball/comments/1k6bzi7/paintbal...

Some highlights:

- I started with just pen, paper and a stopwatch (as a college coach)

- I assumed paintball would be more like football where it's hard to track individual effects

- Turns out it's a surprisingly simple and stable "state machine". e.g. the odds of winning with +1 body (e.g. 5v4, 4v3 etc) is, in college, about ~75%

- Paintball is one of those sports where "the weakest player determines the outcome". Why? b/c if 1 player gets out early, you are fighting out of a hole.

It also made me appreciate that as good a book as Moneyball is, reading it after you try to create analytics for your own sport makes it 3x as enjoyable/insightful.

One downside though:

I would watch games and I got so good at internalizing the stats per state of the game that it was like watching the world series of poker where I could see both player odds of getting eliminated and probability of winning over time charts as I watched the games. Made it harder to be the "come on guys! we can win this" coach when we were down on points + bodies.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#273

Post by bredren »

danielbln wrote: post #93
bredren wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking this past week I have gotten so lazy w my prompting via CLIs. Back in the before I had put such discipline into my prompting and supporting context. Now I’m like, “look here and here and here are some tools, and /skill /skill okay go.” Or “restate this request in your own words and enrich it as appropriate handling any gaps. Okay go”

This made me chuckle because it's so true. So much detailed steering and finagling in the past, now I point the agent to a bunch of information sources, skills, similar repositories that might hold useful input and tell it very roughly what I need and off it goes, I'll grab coffee.

Have you tried this:

   Look here and here and here are some tools, and /skill /skill [repo of folder paths etc] and here is what needs to happen: [stuff].

   ---

   Restate this request in your own words and enrich it as appropriate handling any gaps.
?

It is an ultra-lite way to plan, I suppose.

I like the format because:

    - I still get to put all my thinking into the request but then easily override the instruction
    - It is interesting to see my casual typo-riddled blast professionalized and improved upon.
    - Sometimes it surfaces useful questions that can save some time up front.
I think the models are doing this anyway, but I find the words "enrich" and "gap" are well understood by models and they demonstrate it in the response to the above pattern.

Anyhow, to get back to the point, there are still prompt-level tricks--but ultimately if repeated, should probably also be built into skills themselves!

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#274

Post by Izmaki »

throw310822 wrote: post #89
Izmaki wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded on the "not cheap" argument here. I've spent $25 worth of tokens completing a one-week task in an afternoon, or rather my company spent the money. I would never have personally felt OK with throwing this much money after some prompting back and forth for a few hours, one lazy Saturday afternoon. I ran the risk of not finding the solution before the token usage would be too high for me to want to carry on, if…

Is is sarcasm? $25 to perform in half a day a week of work, that is not cheap, it's a massive saving of money- probably in the thousands.

It's not sarcasm. If I had to pay $25 to perform my work from an ever-growing pile of projects, I would be losing money. That's not "cheap intelligence" for me. It certainly is for my employer, though, because for the mere price of $25 extra per day they can get 4*X the product per period of time.

In Scrum terms my personal velocity grows by a factor of four or more with access to agentic AI workload, but if it means that I will just be asked to "consume" 4*X more Story Points per sprint, I'm not the winner in the end, my employer is. If they asked me to complete X Story Points per sprint regardless of my velocity, and they let me take the days off when I was done, I would be the winner. But that's not how it works.

AI is "Cheap" for the person/organization that gets more product for less money, not for the individual person building the product faster.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#275

Post by petra »

natsucks wrote: post #201
sashank_1509 wrote: post #116

This is all a depressing and bleak future that I don’t look forward to. One solution is to ban LLM’s, to artificially create a demand for human thought, that just feels like living in an artificially constructed zoo. Another solution is humans don’t do anything that AI can do better , / doesn’t need the human touch. So I suppose we will all become artists, sportsmen or politicians, the only jobs that will remain exce…

call me naive, but i really think the pursuit for the new, the better, the interesting, is boundless and humans will never stop. and so for those of us that dream and push and are plain curious will never run out of ways to be useful. and hopefully the fruits of all this tech will be ample enough to support the ones that don't want to or can't participate in that way.

We already drown in useful new things and especially knowledge. There's a limit to how fast we can adopt them.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#276

Post by dudul »

qarl2 wrote: post #169
piloto_ciego wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people who thought they were special and “better” than mere blue-collar workers are realizing that in fact;l they are the same just working with a different medium.

I see a trend line from anti-AI back to anti-evolution to vitalism all the way to Galileo. Humans have a deep need to be special magic flowers - and they can't stand it when science eventually shows them they're not.

Humans just want to be able to work and feed their families. Notice how this is something that is never addressed for example in Asimov's writings where robots do everything. How do people do anything to be able to afford these robots? How do Solarians make money to maintain their massively gigantic estates? It is never explained, but we always jump straight to the "robots do everything, everything is free, nobody works". How about the in between?

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#277

Post by dudul »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #268
sashank_1509 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, a lot of people keep attacking me as anxiety for losing my livelihood. It’s not that. It’s just depression that another avenue for human craftsmanship has been taken over by the machines. Humans are not just infinite consumers. If AI solves all of humanity problems, it’s like living in a zoo, not a life worth living imo.

This has always been the case though that "another avenue of human craftsmanship has been taken over by the machines." It's good if we can have robots building things instead of having humans slumped over a workbench in a sweatshop piecing things together. It's good if we can have LLMs spitting out code rather than CS grads working 15 hour days at fintech startups or whatever. The conditions were never (ever) good be…

I admire the naivety. I'm sure CS grads are delighted...

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#278

Post by qarl2 »

dudul wrote: post #276
qarl2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a trend line from anti-AI back to anti-evolution to vitalism all the way to Galileo. Humans have a deep need to be special magic flowers - and they can't stand it when science eventually shows them they're not.

Humans just want to be able to work and feed their families. Notice how this is something that is never addressed for example in Asimov's writings where robots do everything. How do people do anything to be able to afford these robots? How do Solarians make money to maintain their massively gigantic estates? It is never explained, but we always jump straight to the "robots do everything, everything is free, nobody wo…

Oh yes, I agree entirely. I look at The Jetsons or Star Trek, and I see the fruits of technology shared by all of humankind.

But if the current trends continue, Elon will own all of the robots and the rest of us will be at his mercy.

How we change that - I don't know. But I do know we don't change it by putting our heads in the sand. AI is here and it is real. We MUST take it seriously. Shunning is not a viable option.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#279

Post by piloto_ciego »

dudul wrote: post #276
qarl2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a trend line from anti-AI back to anti-evolution to vitalism all the way to Galileo. Humans have a deep need to be special magic flowers - and they can't stand it when science eventually shows them they're not.

Humans just want to be able to work and feed their families. Notice how this is something that is never addressed for example in Asimov's writings where robots do everything. How do people do anything to be able to afford these robots? How do Solarians make money to maintain their massively gigantic estates? It is never explained, but we always jump straight to the "robots do everything, everything is free, nobody wo…

We're going to have to (collectively at some point) decide that we shouldn't tie survival to working.

Whether that's UBI, or Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, or UBS, or some AI managed economy, or some other such thing, we need to decide that "hey, we don't want to tied survival to output under our current system."

That's really the Rubicon we have to cross, and there are a LOT of people who can't really come up with a better way in their own heads yet.

Look, we all saw how things can be during the pandemic. That was a dark time, but it also gives us a model, we can just... do things. We just have to decide to do them.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#280

Post by dudul »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #208
nilamo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, exploring any of your interests without needing to calculate how it can cover rent means you have more time and opportunities to actually do things you're interested in. Working all day, then not wanting to do much else after because you're tired, is also fun for all of 30 minutes.

Right!? Like imagine we could use this stuff to solve world hunger, develop robots to clean up the oceans, or colonize space? People are all “shucks how am I going to be able to justify my career at $job” and are missing the bigger opportunity. Such a lack of imagination I see…

There is no lack of imagination here, there is realism. You think you display "imagination" by just regurgitating all the tired tropes of old science fiction? Oh wow! Robots to clean the ocean! How novel! Nobody has ever thought about this!

The reality is nobody is going to build robots to clean the ocean because there is no money to be made. There will be robots to clean rich people's pools, sure. And it will put pool boys out of a job, great.

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