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

Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 208 posts

Re: Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

#131

Post by portly »

amelius wrote: post #35
marsten wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

> The goal should be to put everyone out of a job. Yeah, but why does it need to take the fun jobs first, like painting, writing poems, coding, making music, ... I want the AI to cook, do the dishes, take out the trash, etc.

> like painting, writing poems, coding, making music

Citation needed. Do you have an example of someone in the arts losing their job because of AI?

Re: Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

#132

Post by palmotea »

marsten wrote: post #21
drfloyd51 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of feel like software engineers working on improving AI are traitors working against other SE’s trying to make a living. However… I have to acknowledge my craft of SE has been putting people out of work for decades. I myself came up with business process improvement that directly let the company release about 20 people. I did this twice. So… fair play.

In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

> In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

To a point. Then it just frees up people to do nothing.

> The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

That is in fact the goal. The less labor capital needs, the more money (and power) the capitalists get to keep for themselves.

Re: Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

#133

Post by Finbel »

sealeck wrote: post #114
narrator wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The search space for the game of Go was also thought to be too large for computers to manage.

Yes and making a horse drawn cart drive itself was thought to be impossible so why don't we have faster than light travel yet...

Yes but "the search space is too large" is something that has been said about innumerable AI-problems that were then solved. So it's not unreasonable that one doubts the merit of the statement when it's said for the umpteenth time.

Re: Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

#134

Post by renewiltord »

drfloyd51 wrote: post #16
DrewADesign wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I went to the coffeeshop and drank very good coffee listening to music. Then at night I sat and had a beer thinking about T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland', the effect of industrialization in England at that time and his views of how ennui affected the aristocracy. Well, for those among us that are not aristocracy already, except for the vanishingly small number of people required to oversee such processes, we’re probab…

I kind of feel like software engineers working on improving AI are traitors working against other SE’s trying to make a living. However… I have to acknowledge my craft of SE has been putting people out of work for decades. I myself came up with business process improvement that directly let the company release about 20 people. I did this twice. So… fair play.

Sure, but that’s fine. I don’t have any allegiance to other software engineers.

Re: Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

#136

Post by thesz »

narrator wrote: post #97
hodgehog11 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument, that LLMs can develop new crazy strategies using RLVR on math problems (like what happened with Chess), turns out to be false without a serious paradigm shift. Essentially, the search space is far too large, and the model will need help to explore better, probably with human feedback. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13837

The search space for the game of Go was also thought to be too large for computers to manage.

It still is [1].

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-human-amateur-beat-a-top-g...

Re: Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

#137

Post by hodgehog11 »

Finbel wrote: post #133
sealeck wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and making a horse drawn cart drive itself was thought to be impossible so why don't we have faster than light travel yet...

Yes but "the search space is too large" is something that has been said about innumerable AI-problems that were then solved. So it's not unreasonable that one doubts the merit of the statement when it's said for the umpteenth time.

I should have been more specific then. The problem isn't that the search space is too large to explore. The problem is that the search space is so large that the training procedure actively prefers to restrict the search space to maximise short term rewards, regardless of hyperparameter selection. There is a tradeoff here that could be ignored in the case of chess, but not for general math problems.

This is far from unsolvable. It just means that the "apply RL like AlphaGo" attitude is laughably naive. We need at least one more trick.

Re: Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

#138

Post by hodgehog11 »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #100
hodgehog11 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a professional mathematician, I would say that a good proof requires a very good representation of the problem, and then pulling out the tricks. The latter part is easy to get operating using LLMs, they can do it already. It's the former part that still needs humans, and I'm perfectly fine with that.

But are you ok with the trendline of ai improvement? The speed of improvement indicates humans will only get further and further removed from the loop. I see posts like your all the time comforting themselves that humans still matter, and every-time people like you are describing a human owning an ever shrinking section of the problem space.

I used to be worried, but not so much anymore.

It used to be the case that the labs were prioritising replacing human creativity, e.g. generative art, video, writing. However, they are coming to realise that just isn't a profitable approach. The most profitable goal is actually the most human-oriented one: the AI becomes an extraordinarily powerful tool that may be able to one-shot particular tasks. But the design of the task itself is still very human, and there is no incentive to replace that part. Researchers talk a bit less about AGI now because it's a pointless goal. Alignment is more lucrative.

Basically, executives want to replace workers, not themselves.

Re: Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

#139

Post by eproxus »

falcor84 wrote: post #30
frizlab wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would go for a 2 or 3 hour walk with my phone using the remote control feature looking every 5 - 10 minutes to make sure it doesn't need human help. That is a nightmarish scenario tbh

Nightmarish?! In comparison to the average person's actual job? I'm pretty sure that many people out there would sign up for a battle royale for a chance at such a job.

I you think you’ll be paid 3 hours of salary for every 5 minutes of work, I have bad news for you.

Most likely your 3 hours will be filled with managing 36 different AI sessions at a time and it will slowly break your brain.

At least if we keep doing capitalism the way we are.

Re: Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

#140

Post by oytis »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #92
oytis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason why market for plumbing will get much larger than it is now (which is not too large)

Are you kidding? Plumber seem really in demand. Finding a conpetent plumber with reasonable pricing is difficult where im at

Not saying market can't expand at all. Prices can go down, waiting times can go down, but still people only need that many faucets installed.

If we seriously expect whits collar jobs not be a thing anymore, then I am not seeing trades having nearly enough capacity to absorb all the released workforce

Post reply on HN