Live data from Hacker News

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

davidepiffer.com

441–450 of 545 posts

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

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we don't. Public schools are incentivized not to help high performers. It actually hurts their metrics and budget. The widespread gifted/talented experience in public school ended in the late 90s. The actual intelligence segregation is self-selected. PMC parents live together in the same neighborhoods. Whether you believe in genetic or social factors, the smart kids come from here. In the 80s and 90s there was an…

Check out NYC school district. Has high schools where entrance is 100% based on a single entrance exam score.

De Blasio tried to phase out G&T, and Mamdani has advocated for the same. There is an ideological push that views these accelerated tracks as fundamentally inequitable.

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

#442
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sabine has been at the forefront and has the goods: https://youtu.be/1mgxuVVUz40 And for the inevitable critics of Sabine...maybe Leonard Susskind is good enough for you: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok

The error with this approach is that every single physics theory gets exactly the same criticisms. You can take any of the theories that Hossenfelder would spend time on instead of the ones she does not like, and you would find (basically) a similar percentage of physicists saying it's a mistake to continue in this direction. In other terms: for each physics theory, on 100 physicists, you have 5 physicists saying it…

And in the meanwhile you ignored Susskind, literally one of the fathers of String Theory saying "we need to start all over again"... :-))

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind

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

#443

One thing about human mathematicians is that they only publish positive results. Professors etc might have file drawers full of "negative results", but the incentives and bandwidth of human mathematicians makes publishing these useful results impossible. But AI agents have no such limitations and can publish and re-use negative traces easily. There have been some recent projects ( https://www.theoremdb.org ) aimed at…

What is a "negative result" in maths? "I tried something and it didn't work" isn't really a result. It's experience maybe. But it's not like science where finding only evidence for the null hypothesis is considered boring. Even unsurprising results are published and even celebrated in mathematics, like Fermat's last theorem.

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

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 human…

Adding arms and 360 vision is not free. Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle. The one who wins is not the one that makes the best robot ever. The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.

> Adding arms and 360 vision is not free.

Vision is hard regardless of the angle, but scaling it from a normal camera to 360° doesn't add much cost or difficulty once you've done the hard part of turning pixels into a suitable latent space.

> Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle.

500 million neurons across the whole animal, brain included. We'll only know the synapse count when someone does a full connectome scan of one, but based on the vague estimates I see with a quick search, their whole mind is less complex than a SotA LLM today.

> The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.

This is a reason for specialists, not generalists.

A literal Swiss army knife is a perfectly reasonable thing to own, but you don't want to hire a builder who only has that and nothing else, not even if it's the silly model: https://www.vintageknives.nl/p/wenger-giant-swiss-army-knife...

The best container ship is a terrible pleasure yacht, and vice versa. You use container ships pretty much constantly, even though you (almost certainly) don't own one, by the power of indirection. You can rent a pleasure yacht as desired without owning own.

In both cases, the cheap option is to use the right tool for the right job, rather than to take a holiday on the Hanoi Express and get your next international shipment delivered by this: https://www.boattrader.com/boat/1996-hatteras-82-convertible...

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

#446
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ability to hold ideas in the mind simultaneously. Some can hold a great deal more than others. It can be exercised, but is definitely bound by genetics. If you want an example of someone at the near peak of human ability, check out Jon Von Neumann. Then there is an ability to peer deeply into complex problems and somehow find the simplest truths that make sense of it all. Think of Einstein. Both are incre…

From the article: The physicist Eugene Wigner, who knew both John von Neumann and Albert Einstein, wrote that no one he had encountered possessed a mind as “quick and acute” as von Neumann’s. Von Neumann could absorb vast amounts of information, follow extraordinarily complicated arguments and move between mathematical fields with astonishing speed. Yet Wigner still regarded Einstein’s understanding as deeper, more p…

ah man, my bad. 99% of the time I read the articles before I comment.

The article literally made my point already. Sorry about that.

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

#447
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ability to hold ideas in the mind simultaneously. Some can hold a great deal more than others. It can be exercised, but is definitely bound by genetics. If you want an example of someone at the near peak of human ability, check out Jon Von Neumann. Then there is an ability to peer deeply into complex problems and somehow find the simplest truths that make sense of it all. Think of Einstein. Both are incre…

From the article: The physicist Eugene Wigner, who knew both John von Neumann and Albert Einstein, wrote that no one he had encountered possessed a mind as “quick and acute” as von Neumann’s. Von Neumann could absorb vast amounts of information, follow extraordinarily complicated arguments and move between mathematical fields with astonishing speed. Yet Wigner still regarded Einstein’s understanding as deeper, more p…

[deleted]

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

#448
Working memory is literally the L1 cache of the brain, which holds a mere 3-7 objects. The article seems to conflate w-m with regular memory, which is what a human knows at a specific time.

Computers, especially now with LLMs, have everything vastly larger than human like speed and complexity. What LLMs lack is more qualitative traits, like creativity, abstraction and intuition.

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

#449
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding arms and 360 vision is not free. Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle. The one who wins is not the one that makes the best robot ever. The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.

> Adding arms and 360 vision is not free. Vision is hard regardless of the angle, but scaling it from a normal camera to 360° doesn't add much cost or difficulty once you've done the hard part of turning pixels into a suitable latent space. > Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle. 500 million neurons across the whole animal, brain included. We'll only know the synapse coun…

I will ignore the insane comparison between neurons and LLMs. But

> This is a reason for specialists, not generalists.

Precisely not. The amount of work a human can do is basically unenumerable. Requiring a specialist for each task will quickly run up costs to be completely unreasonable.

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

#450
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

in Gujarati its "Gand vagar no loto". ( Utensil with Round Ass ). I guess every language as its equivalent.

Brazilian portuguese has cu de ferro, which literally translates to iron ass, something one must of course have in order to apply themselves to scholarly activities.
Post reply on HN