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

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

#301

Post by cauch »

chongli wrote: post #282
cauch wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were the one introducing the argument "they are getting advantages out of it so we should be careful to not take what they say as an impartial view". Same can be told of Hossenfelder (personally, I would say that Hossenfelder has shown more clues that indeed she is not very reliable and would prefer caricatural sensationalistic descriptions, which is not what the typical string theory physicist does).

No, my point was only to refute the idea that people need to be egotistical or moronic (the only two options) to cling to an idea past its expiry date. People could also be “pot-committed” career-wise. Or they could have myriad other reasons (identity, sunk-cost fallacy, etc). Nowhere did I suggest that “the reason for discrediting string theorists is that they have financial stakes in the idea.” Please try to be mor…

You said

> No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now.

This is not presented as "yet another option that may or may not be the reality", this is presented as your conclusion of why we observe what we observe.

Maybe it is not what you are thinking, but you cannot blame people for interpreting your message the way you have written it.

I agree with you that there are several options, one of the most probable, that you did not mention, is that the situation of the string theory is just "normal" and some idiots are not able to understand that.

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

#302

Post by nkrisc »

yesco wrote: post #243
grahamburger wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have told me I was smart since I was a kid, but I can't remember for shit. I had a thought when I was fairly young that the only reason I was (maybe, sometimes) outperforming others intellectually is that I was habitually compensating for my poor memory by working things out on the fly, while others could rely more on rote memorization. Anyway, takes all kinds I guess!

Somewhat tangential, but this reminds me of when I took a certain Microbiology midterm in college. I hadn't put much effort into that class leading up to it, as I had some tough CS classes that consumed my focus that semester (also was admittedly not a great student in general). So when I finally went to take the midterm, after cramming like mad before the exam, I quickly realized I basically didn't know the answer t…

> I just kept doing multiple passes through it, each time I noticed one of my answers contradicted one of the others, I would make adjustments to harmonize, which indirectly refined my understanding.

This strategy saved my ass on so many tests from high school through college that I did not study properly for.

I think it would certainly be possible to write a test such that this strategy doesn’t work at all, but lucky for me no one did in any meaningful way.

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

#303

Post by pwython »

zamalek wrote: post #274
s3tt3mbr1n1 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :).

Yep, terrible speller -- bad at pronunciation too (by the way I just autocorrected that word) -- and I often wonder how people, who are much more intelligent than me on paper, can't figure out random tasks that just seem obvious.

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

#304

Post by techpression »

rowanG077 wrote: post #233
ben_w wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entirety of human civilization is human shaped. That's the marketing pitch. A plumbing robot doesn't need to be humanoid, an octopus shape may well be better for all the awkward corners. A robot police officer could be the municipality itself for sensory nodes (essentially the sales pitch of Flock etc.), plus some drones or robot dogs to perform arrests*. The robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers we already have…

You are not understanding what humanoid robots are about. Those are specialist robots you are describing. The promise is of course one robot that can do the plumbing, clean your house, do the dishes, build a house, and basically every physical job a human can do. It's extreme lly likely that at least a somewhat humanoid shape is required for that.

Humans are really bad at everything we do compared to the specialized creatures in nature, it’s just that we can do many things that sets us apart. A humanoid robot is incredibly dumb for that reason. At least add a set of arms and legs and 360 vision. And obviously dislocated joints than can move freely and hands should have two thumbs and more fingers.

It’s not hard to come up with a bunch of improvements for humans, it’s just that making robots in our image is a lot more trivial because you only have to solve for those same averages attributes that we have.

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

#305

Post by EA-3167 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #224
EA-3167 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So applied math, math, applied math, applied math, and maybe some others. That makes sense, although I'd argue that at least in the realm of HEP theoretical physics has extraordinarily expensive kit compared to what scientists make. See: The LHC.

Reducing all these fields to mathematics is incredibly reductive. I don't think it's in good faith.

I think it's telling that "Researchers cost more than any other aspect of research" seems to involve primarily math as inputs and outputs. Like I said the obvious outlier is theoretical physics because that tends to involve significant resources both to explore (supercomputers) and verify (colliders, telescopes, interferometers, etc). Most people involved in research in any number of fields do not find that their collective salaries are the majority of the cost required; math is an outlier in many cases.

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

#306

Post by 8note »

tengbretson wrote: post #82
grebc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of string theory. People go whole lives without being able to make it pan out.

String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.

even if its not particularly relevant to the physical world around us, it still explored cool math

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

#307

Post by atleastoptimal »

chongli wrote: post #199
atleastoptimal wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans have nothing to contribute then shared understanding is a pointless endeavor. It makes sense now in the "centaur" period where human + AI > AI alone, but when AI mathematicians are both more rigorous and more elegant, then taking the time dumbing down their proofs to a human level of understanding is like requiring that we ensure all our current proofs be understandable by a monkey.

Where is the value in an unintelligible gibberish proof? We already have countless examples of such filling up the arXiv, written by hacks long before LLMs started writing proofs. No one cares about them. You might as well build a box blasting radio static into the void. You could save a lot of electricity that way.

An unintelligible but correct proof is better than no proof. These first AI proofs may be overly complex and un-elegant, but they are the worst that frontier math proofs will ever be. AI math in 2030 will be leaps and bounds ahead of humans both in rigor and elegance.

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

#308

Post by cauch »

tossandthrow wrote: post #266
cauch wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "shared knowledge" means "shared knowledge between mathematicians and lay persons" (there is no much point in that, the same way a smartphone technician knows how a smartphone works deep down to the details but there is no big interest for society to have every lay persons being informed about it). I think it means "shared knowledge between mathematicians". And at this level, while there are anecdotical…

I don't get the argument. I get that there is a cultural benefit to keeping it alive. Just like we ideally want the languages represented at the universities. But keeping humans in the loop does not appear to be necessary in order to call it science, and certainly not in order to have progress or dessiminate that progress. I don't have a problem with people doing math. As long that we don't idiomatically hold on to t…

The goal is indeed to have progress or disseminate that progress.

The point of Tao is that people see LLM providing "proofs" and are concluding that this is all that is needed to "have progress or disseminate that progress". That is the same mistake of thinking that "generating food" is all that is needed to "have people not dying of hunger".

The hard part of "have progress or disseminate that progress" is the human network. A fundamental point of this human network is that it generate trust, accountability and reliability. Generating "useful new theorem" is useless unless the society also built the trust around the theorem to distinguish it from a fake theorem.

Maybe in the future, we will have AI doing some part of it, but this is a totally different AI animal than the one we are able to have now, and people who think the current AI that we see now is able to do that have no understanding how it works. This is demonstrated by the facts in math: current AI is able to provide math proofs, and yet, a lot of human work is still needed to get progress out of current AI.

I would not bet that individual humans will still play a role as big as today in the future. Maybe AI will be different in the future, but the reality is that we don't have any indication if this is even possible.

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

#309

Post by chongli »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #225
chongli wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an AI can communicate its findings to us in a way that we can understand it, then its findings are by definition intelligible to humans. Your claim was about texts for which this is not possible.

So, you're willing to claim that a conclusion that you don't understand the reasoning for is equivalent to comprehension? Because, again, I can point to hundreds of examples of texts where nobody but the author understands it, and they're only giving summarized "commandments" that you should follow if you want good results. If I told you "don't use spin locks, call futex instead", do you think have gained an understa…

If I told you "don't use spin locks, call futex instead", do you think have gained an understanding of the Linux scheduler?

Yes, because I already knew what schedulers are, what spinlocks are, and if I want to know what futex is I can go look it up. Comprehension is within my grasp.

Your original claim, which you’ve repeatedly distanced yourself from (by trying to use comprehensible examples) but won’t admit to, was about incomprehensible stuff. That is, text that no human could possibly understand, ever.

You’re repeatedly engaging in intellectual dishonesty rather than simply admit that “human comprehension probably will continue for the foreseeable future”, which is really not a controversial idea at all.

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

#310

Post by rowanG077 »

chongli wrote: post #294
rowanG077 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see that at all. Nowhere did this person evoke placing AI above people or even remotely evoke religious imagery. You imagined that yourself, and that creeps me out.

It’s right here: The age of humans comprehending things is coming to an end [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312914

That does not place AI above humans and neither does it evoke anything religious.

Look at it this way. AI has destroyed humanity at chess for decades now. That doesn't mean we have placed AI above humans in the general sense.

You have basically totally fabricated what you thought the other person was saying.

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