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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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Yeah, Christiano is absolutely right here. There are some sorts of problems which have significant components that are comparatively much simpler for machines than humans, for example:

  • Problems that can proceed mostly by only a limited number of steps at any place, but where it's hard to figure out which sequence of steps to pursue and doing a large number of them of them is basically impossible for a human in any reasonable time. A computer can just try them a ton of them, so any improvements in ways to narrow the search space make them even better. A lot of geometry problems are like this.
  • Problems that have a straightforward method of solution which is difficult for humans to execute properly without mistakes. "Just brute force it with Muirhead's Inequality" has been a thing for a long time now and a lot of competitors actually do this on contests even though it is frequently horribly messy. My recollection is that conventional wisdom in this was: if you try this, you'd better not make any mistakes because judges will not award partial credit to brute force solutions with errors. But of course a computer will not have these errors. (Christiano seems to indicate that inequalities that are doable this way don't show up as much anymore, which is a very good thing regardless of AI.)
  • Problems that can be easily solved with a simple trick that is hard to find but easy to execute when you do. E.g. diophantine equations that fall apart with a particular modulus (or two). Humans need well-developed mathematical intuition to find the needle in the haystack; a computer can just try everything.

This is not to say that it's trivial to make a computer be superhuman at these problems. Despite there being aspects that are very machine-friendly, there's still a lot of difficult work to be done to actually get a machine do them. But it shouldn't make you update particularly much; this is not an "AI is now smarter than IMO medalists" moment.

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