An agent in 100 lines of Lisp • Hacker News Board

Re: An agent in 100 lines of Lisp

#81

Post by cma » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:26 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #79

cma wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This deepmind paper showed big limitations on nested structures with transformers, LSTMs actually did better: Neural Networks and the Chomsky Hierarchy https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02098

Interesting. Can someone quickly summarize their results? Are they saying that using languages with simpler syntax Lisp lead to LLM being able to generalize their knowledge better?

They tested them on formal languages of different power, and saw where they could generalize beyond the training data. Transformers failed to generalize pretty early on at stack machines/brace matching.

It was a good bit older of a paper though, if I remember it's somewhat expected from the pure feed forward nature of them and limited circuit depth, where LSTMs have some recurrence.

Re: An agent in 100 lines of Lisp

#82

Post by zingar » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:34 AM UTC

Zambyte wrote: post #70

zingar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t seen an LLM generate syntactically invalid code in any language in … a year? So I don’t know if “more likely to be syntactically valid” is a good enough selling point. But maybe I’m interpreting you too narrowly?

I take it you never run models locally then? Local models that can run on reasonable consumer hardware have gotten to the point of being very useful, but they still occasionally are tripped up with syntax errors. Especially if you quantize the model and KV.

Ah of course, I do have a blind spot with local models.

Re: An agent in 100 lines of Lisp

#83

Post by guillaume_code » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: An agent in 100 lines of Lisp

#84

Post by ySPARK » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

tosh wrote: post #57

9 lines of python: import json,sys,uuid;from subprocess import getoutput as sh;from urllib.request import Request as R,urlopen b={"model":"gpt-5.6","prompt_cache_key":uuid.uuid4().hex,"input":[],"tools":[{"type":"custom","name":"shell"}]} while prompt:=input("> "): b["input"]+=[{"role":"user","content":prompt}] while True: o=(r:=json.load(urlopen(R(sys.argv[1],json.dumps(b).encode(),{"Content-Type":"application/json"…

Every Lisp program can be written in one line.