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I take it this way. How many problems can you solve using knowing mostly exact cover. Not very many. But, if we can build ML systems that can solve mostly any p

I take it this way. How many problems can you solve using knowing mostly exact cover. Not very many. But, if we can build ML systems that can solve mostly any problem(we can't today) even without giving any insight, I would say it will be one of the things whose impact will surpass anything. Note, I am not getting into AGI, just saying a system that can solve objective problems. And while sudoku is not a very good example, but I think it shows we can do many cool things from neural networks. Neural networks are the most sure bet for such a system.

taeric 9y ago
You'd be surprised how far exact cover can get you. The trick isn't in knowing exact cover, per se. But in seeing how to map problems to different problems. That is, the "exact cover" nature of Sudoku is not immediately obvious to everyone. At least, it wasn't obvious to me. Seeing how quickly you can map it to that and then get a solution was a lot of fun and ridiculously educational.