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AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

davidepiffer.com

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Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#141
post #57

It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working.

AI has sitzfleisch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#:~:text=...

This was such an interesting thing to learn

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#142
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're just going to slowly deconstruct every element that could be a factor of intelligence. It's not out-thinking, it's just out-remembering It's not out-thinking, it's just out-working It's not out-thinking, it's just able to consider more things simultaneously It's not creative, it's just randomly generating things and then selecting viable ones

But the difference really does matter and is not just a case of "whittling down" what intelligence really is. We have known for a very long time that computers and machines are much faster than humans, more accurate, are scalable in certain ways that humans aren't, and they don't tire. I think most people who are not in the "AI cult" would agree that LLMs and modern generative AI are really just an extension of those…

There's definitely a lot missing from the current state of the art in machine learning that all brains manage to beat, and we can observe this just because an animal that needs as many examples as an AI to learn motor functions would starve to death before learning to eat.

However I can only guess that this is important, I'm not absolutely certain. They're at risk of being an economic disruptor just by being extremely stupid (by how much they need to study) faster than us to the same ratio we jog faster than continental drift.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#145
post #81

It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working.

We're just going to slowly deconstruct every element that could be a factor of intelligence. It's not out-thinking, it's just out-remembering It's not out-thinking, it's just out-working It's not out-thinking, it's just able to consider more things simultaneously It's not creative, it's just randomly generating things and then selecting viable ones

A new technology being able to do something better than humans does not mean it’s intelligent though. A calculation program is not intelligent just because it can remember more digits than me, work more than me

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#146

Does it matter? It's going to produce proofs far more intricate than humans can understand, outdoing humans and opening new frontiers. The age of humans comprehending things is coming to an end: our brains just won't have the capacity to make meaningful contributions to science, math, or technology.

> The age of humans comprehending things is coming to an end: our brains just won't have the capacity to make meaningful contributions to science, math, or technology. That sentiment makes me cringe. If you understand how LLMs work, you'd know it'll never be possible without a fundamental change in how these work. We're also supposed to be reaching that point, somehow, without the LLMs ever being intelligent (in the…

Maybe you can enlighten us. In what way aren't LLMs able to make new contributions.

LLMs in agentic harnesses are Turing complete.

To my best knowledge, we don't know of any greater computational model that the brain is a part of, that LLMs are not.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#147

It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working.

In other words: Thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231974

Take something like

  (1+x*y)^3*z+y^2*(1+x*y)*(4+3*x*y);y+3*x*(1+x*y)^2*z+3*x*y^2*(4+3*x*y);2*x-3*x^2*y-x^3*z|0,0,-1/4|1,-3/2,13/2
If a thousand monkeys typed at a character per second, on a keyboard with the 23 relevant characters, it would take roughly 10^136 years for them to come up with this counterexample. Though, to be fair to monkey scenario, there's a large family of them known now, so it's not quite this bad: suppose there are a trillion permutations and similar examples that fit in this string. Then we are down to 10^124 years.

If LLMs are monkeys, somehow trained LLM weights allow them to model and prune massive numbers of universes in parallel.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My browser doesn't do the fancy URL text selection... sitzfleisch: the ability to endure or carry on with an activity Something Oppenheimer did not have, apparently.

loaned from German, where it's originally a way to say buttocks, literally "sitting flesh". If you have more Sitzfleisch you can sit for longer. Both in the literal sense (a bigger butt makes sitting more comfortable) and in the figurative sense (having the mental ability to sit for longer, get more desk work done)

I think there is an IT bit of humor from about 1 decade+ back where the people who's proposals won out in meeting were the ones that could keep from needing to go to the bathroom longer.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#149

C'mon AI companies, pivot to lawyers or doctors already. Trying to convince us that mathematics and software engineering are "solved" is getting very tiring. The pushback would probably be too much for the soon-to-be IPO-ed companies.

They try to sell AI as lawyer or doctor replacements as well. But because it’s HackerNews we are biased towards our domains to see them more often.

Well also you can't just throw AI slop as doctors or lawyers advice and fail multiple times until you find the right answer. With code and math you can have failures 1000 times for every success and still get rewarded.
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