Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

davidepiffer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 546 posts

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

#271

Post by sjjsjsjjsjaj »

chongli wrote: post #90
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? What percentage of the people using it to great commercial effect can understand it? How's your understanding of Schroedingers "An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules"? You seem to be using the results of it as applied to semiconductor engineering just fine. And, I promise you, most semiconductor engineers haven't read it in…

You've moved the goalposts. The original claim was about producing mathematics that are in principle impossible for any human to understand . All the stuff you've listed is understood by some person, and that understanding is the source of its value. Now that we've cleared that up, can you furnish an example that satisfies the original claim of incomprehensibility and value?

Nothing is in principle impossible to understand. It just takes too long, is inconvenient and/or economically unviable.

I don’t find it hard at all to imagine that an AI comes up with a fundamental proof applicable to physics which results in some widget we can now produce that would otherwise not have been produced yet nobody takes the time to fully comprehend why it works. Somebody could, in principle, devote their lives to it and possibly get it, but for what purpose?

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

#272

Post by vitorsr »

shdh wrote: post #254
orphereus wrote: post #16

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.

Look up OpenEvidence

Most used as a Wikipedia-on-the-fly. Replaces UpToDate and other POC tools NOT professionals operating them.

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

#273

Post by Quarrelsome »

dyarosla wrote: post #255
hibikir wrote: post #198

I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…

> I don't think I've had a truly original idea in my life. There’s no such thing as a truly original idea. It is all just combining A+B!

if someone did have a truly original idea, then everyone would probably think it was terrible anyway and we'd all ridicule them, because we'd have no frame of reference for X + Y if all we know is A and B :)

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

#274

Post by zamalek »

s3tt3mbr1n1 wrote: post #267
jermaustin1 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I have bad "factual" memory, but very good "conceptual" memory. I might not remember exactly what someone told me, but I probably gathered a keyword, and a feeling and idea of what they told me. Almost like it takes what they said then compresses it into my mind in a nice little multi-key lookup table.

Thanks, I feel seen.

In my, admittedly extremely small sample set, concept-focused memory is common for people with any degree or kind of dyslexia. I used to struggle with understanding how people couldn't understand things, now that I'm more mature it makes sense how people struggled with me not being able to spell things :).

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

#275

Post by ilaksh »

"OK, it might be much better at math than me, but it's not smarter, it just remembers more".

Heh. Every day, a new type of cope. It's like, coping as hard as possible.

If this was an ML researcher trying to come up with a way to improve performance then you could say it wasn't cope but rather practical observation to serve a goal.

But it's just cope.

Also, AI is going to continue to get smarter. A lot smarter. There are already systems in R&D that will continue increasing efficiency and performance of hardware by more orders of magnitude.

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

#276

Post by bodash »

hibikir wrote: post #198

I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…

Agreed “remembering” stuff is critical in most life’s situations where if you did, you will appeared to be smart. This is probably why spaced repetition has been a key element in learning for the past few decades.

But “remembering” is only the beginning (you have to remember first!), after that, elements like understanding relations, connecting dots and remixing, timing, etc will truly make one shine.

In one way, it’s like the current “LLM + Harness” setup for agents. LLM is how well it remembers, but different harness techniques really matters, at times even a worse model mixed with great harness can outperform great model with bad harness

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

#277

Post by Barbing »

dyarosla wrote: post #255
hibikir wrote: post #198

I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…

> I don't think I've had a truly original idea in my life. There’s no such thing as a truly original idea. It is all just combining A+B!

Cavemen came up with the initial A & B, and we’ve gone from there? (Didn’t think this through much yet!)

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

#278

Post by Nextgrid »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #194
devmor wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty silly belief to hold about science. Plenty of strong, well held standards of the modern era were considered ridiculous fringe beliefs a century ago.

They were testable, no?

Not taking either side here - but surely a lot of cosmological phenomena couldn't be testable/verifiable at the time they were theorized either?

(thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)

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

#279

Post by maleldil »

bonoboTP wrote: post #206
alterom wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bandwidth is absolutely there ("we tried this and it didn't work" is totally the stuff of conference discussions). The incentives are not. The incentives are skewed towards "a magician never reveals her secrets". The results are presented as if a rabbit got pulled out of a hat, with a maximum ta-da! effect, and little backstory of how the hell did we get there . Don't get me wrong, these things are discussed , of…

This is not specific to math. To non-academics, you basically have to rewrite your commit history to make it seem more impressive. You often write the motivation section last. At least math publication culture allows saying "We consider the problem of" and then solve it. In AI/ML academic papers you need much more "story" around why, what the applications are, why aren't you doing something else, defend against lack-…

Yeah, publishing in ML can be annoying because of that. What's wrong with "I thought this problem was interesting"?

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

#280

Post by bhaak »

OroPla wrote: post #197
aurareturn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people make these comments about string theory, are they at the forefront of quantum physics theory and have spent years on modern string theory? Or did they just watch a YouTube video and then keep parroting this?

I also just keep parroting that the Earth is not flat and a bunch of other things I've been told and then never questioned, since it seems to make sense. When the flath-earth craze started I've been trying to at least get that bit actually personally verified. Haven't managed to do it to this day, though. So I'll just keep parroting various things without properly understanding them. C'est la vie.

Your drive to verify must be very low then. There are hundreds of small logic reasonings or even experiments with which you can easily prove that a flat earth model is at least very complicated or even impossible.

Explaining Moon phases gets very complicated in any flat earth model. With binoculars you can see the shadows of craters on the moon's terminator. Or the phases of Venus whereas Mars doesn't have any.

Timezones are ridiculously hard to explain on a flat earth.

A proper theory must explain all of them and no flat earth model can do that. A round Earth OTOH easily does.

Post reply on HN