Blueberry
1d ago
Someone on hacker news had for the last 20 years a specific problem in graph theory (Barnette's conjecture) and tried to understand the proof (and tried to translate it for non-math people) and was astonished that it used multiple esoteric "symbolic tricks borrowed from theoretical physics". He used Anthropics Fable to understand the OpenAI proof and first thought Fable was hallucinating techno-babble:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49988654
Forgive me for posting LLM output but I find this darkly hilarious:
"it's a matrix-tree cancellation wearing Kasteleyn's planar signs, run as a Witten index over Penrose-lineage states, evaluated as a fugacity-zero loop gas in an infinitesimal magnetic field — and the reason it reads like physics is that every one of those tools was built for partition functions"
I thought this was pure slop when I read it but there are some clear analogues in these other areas of physics, really neat computational tricks, and a very interesting paper by Penrose calculating Tait colorings I never knew about previously
So at least this proof (and at least to some guy on hn) this proof were not from the LLM digesting prior art papers on this problem or general graph theory, but from "the entire corpus of neat computational tricks that physicists derived to make their equations spit out something other than zero or infinity". Which makes it very unlikely a human could have thought of it, as few graph theorists are familiar with infinitesimal magnetic fields (and vice versa).
Blueberry
1d ago
I just found this place on an idle lurk through /r/slatestarcodex. As far as I can tell, it's a surviving remnant of the more iconoclastic elements of the rationalist/postrat/lesswrong sphere
There is also the anagram offshoot datasecretslox:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php
It looms more oldschool in the bboard aesthetic (which I like), but is a bit wider on topics.
Blueberry
1d ago
Based on the multiple text messages
Is there a neutral source giving an overview? News articles only summarize it and social media is piece by piece.
Reasoning from fiction about the real world is a fallacy (imaginary map vs real territory?), and science fiction says more about the time it was created as the depicted future. Old scifi imagined any household chores done by robots, but they couldn't imagine that the washing machine freed women from being housewives and the coming waves of feminism. In 60s StarTrek they couldn't get female commanding officers as women in the test viewership hated the bossy actress, in 90s Star Trek there were no gay people (not to mention transgender), and Picard was bald. In a real future with Star Trek like tech everyone will have fantastic hair and some otherkin/wolfkin will use transporter tech to degenerate themselves to furry-hybrids. And the holodeck itself is a can of worms...
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