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Right, I brought it up as an instance of a class of problems that has this property of being easy to specify but difficult to implement correctly. It will know
by marginalia_nu 4y ago
Right, I brought it up as an instance of a class of problems that has this property of being easy to specify but difficult to implement correctly. It will know how to implement a binary search because a great deal of articles have been written about the correct way of implementing a binary search and the pitfalls of this one particular problem is very well documented.
It's almost unique in that the problem has a corpus of literature about how difficult they are to implement correctly, which pitfalls are common, and how to solve them. ChatGPT being able to regurgitate this solution is not a good demonstration of it's ability to solve general programming problems.
- dilap 4y agoThat's my general point: it's easier to say what you want than to implement it in a low-level (relative to English) language. Hence why English is a good programming language. And LLMs aren't just good at binary search, they're good at lots of things. Imagine you are in a room with a programmer who is unquestionably better and more expert than you are. Now let's say you need to write a program. Would you be better off trying to write it yourself, or describing what you want to the better programmer, and letting them write it? Obviously the latter! Given a sufficiently advanced compatriot, English is the preferred programming language. Now, are LLMs good enough? Probably not yet, but getting there rapidly!