Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI has sitzfleisch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#:~:text=...
We Americans call it grit.
That's just life without a bidet.
AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
491–500 of 545 posts
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Making robots that are human shaped is easier and more efficient than redesigning and rebuilding everything that exists. In the last 100-200 years, that has been proven wrong at every single step.
Generalist humanoid robots that are able to operate in unstructured environments weren't an option (they still aren't an option for the majority of operations). The humanity had no ways of building them. Anyway, it's true that replacing an automated production line with a crowd of generalist robots doesn't make sense. Generalist humanoid robots are intended to replace the remaining human workers.
They weren't an option because they are much harder to build, that's my point. Fat from being the easy option, they are still the unlikely option, compared to purpose designed machines.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#493It was duuring my PhD I realised that thinking is essentially 1. remembering all the different information to remember all the tricks 2. trying all the different tricks in the problem 3. optimizing deciding which to try based on different information 4. trying random things to discover patterns (and hence new tricks) 5. explaining your tricks to others so that they can do the first 4 steps independently and come up w…
> That's all thinking is That's more because a PhD (especially in this socioeconomic era where academia is also a microcosm of capitalism) does not automatically teach or focus on deep inquiry, rather narrow research programmes. Case in point, fallaciously reducing it all to a superficial theory of tricks means that by the same light, general relativity or any other major scientific result is merely just a trick. Tha…
> „[…] but the fact is many PhD students do still graduate with very unexamined understanding of science, cognition, philosophy, etc.”
Is there some generally accepted definition what it should take to graduate with a PhD?
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
> many top mathematicians have, through hard work, internalized many more complex mathematical chunks than ordinary humans Do you really think an average person can internalize complex math? Them compressing it effectively and then remembering it is a sign of (very) high intelligence.
If explained in a specific way and order, yes, it's likely.
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Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#495"There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first."
Sherlock Holmes, 'A Study in Scarlet'Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#496I 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…
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!
Yes I was (and am) precisely the same way. This is why I think I'm so awful at foreign languages.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#497A convenient fact about mathematics is that people have put a lot of effort into making it a self-contained logical universe. AI doesn’t need a conventional world model to be great at mathematics.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#498Is there anyone on the planet who doesn’t think ”thinking” also includes memory?
There's a depressing number who dismiss the benefits of things like learning times tables as 'rote learning' rather than force-multipliers that free your brain for other things.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#499[dead]
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#500Aka - it’s a stochastic parrot with a good memory, for anyone still struggling to understand this. It should be obvious, imo, but some people seem to have trouble with the concept.
lol, it’s so funny to see people in mid 2026 still insisting they’re nothing more than stochastic parrots. I guess some people have allowed their fear to completely take over their reasoning abilities.
Man, it’s pathetic watching you crawl through my comments like this. You really seem upset that LLMs can’t think.
Is the issue that you have no human friends? I can understand the appeal of the yes-machine when no one else will tolerate you, but that’s no real substitute.