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Having read the article, I couldn't see anything being recursive. Even the article is doubtful that what they show counts as recursion at all: >> It’s kind of

Having read the article, I couldn't see anything being recursive. Even the article is doubtful that what they show counts as recursion at all: >> It’s kind of like traditional recursion in code but instead of having a function that calls itself with a different set of arguments, there is a prompt that returns itself with specific parts updated to reflect the new arguments. Well, "kind of like traditional recursion" is not recursion. At best it's "kind of like" recursion. I have no idea what "traditional" recursion is, anyway. I know primitive recursion, linear recursion, etc, but "traditional" recursion? What kind of recursion is that? Like they did it in the old days, where they had to run all their code by hand, artisanal-like? If so, then OK, because what's shown in the article is someone "running" a "recursive" "loop" by hand (none of the things in quotes are what they are claimed to be), then writing some Python to do it for them. And the Python is not even recursive, it's a while-loop (so more like "traditional" iteration, I guess?). None of that intermediary management should be needed, if recursion was really there. To run recursion, one only needs recursion. Anyway, if ChatGPT could run recursive functions it should be able also to "go infinite" by entering say, an infinite left-recursion. Or, even better, it should be able to take a couple hundred years to compute the Ackermann function for some large-ish value, like, dunno, 8,8. Ouch. What does ChatGPT do when you ask it to calculate ackermann(8,8)? Hint: it does not run it.

blowski 4y ago
Definition of recursive in the everyday English sense: > Of or relating to a repeating process whose output at each stage is applied as input in the succeeding stage. This sounds very recursive by that definition.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  There ain't no definition of recursive in "the everyday English sense". You may as well ask your grandma how she sucks eggs "recursively".
  - blowski 4y ago
    https://www.wordnik.com/words/recursive https://www.wordnik.com/words/recursive This usage of the word is first recorded in 1620. > You may as well ask your grandma how she sucks eggs "recursively". I guess this would involve her using an already sucked egg to suck another one.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
      >> This usage of the word is first recorded in 1620. And that just goes to show that it's an "everyday" word, right? Like, dunno, "alarum" (a sound to the battel), "burgesse" (a head man of a towne), "combure" (burne or consume with fire) and many other words from the same time [1]? >> I guess this would involve her using an already sucked egg to suck another one. See what I mean? No, for recursion she has to suck the egg and then put it back in the shell, and suck again. She has to use both her mouth, to suck, and her nose to expell. It can be done, the nasal cavity and the pharynx are a closed loop. I mean, if you wanna play with words, we can all have some fun, eh? ________________ [1] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DOdiAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DOdiAAAAcAAJ&printsec=fr...
      - andyk 4y ago
        Why hypothesize what our grandmas would say when we can ask GPT: you are a grandma sucking eggs recursively. Let's think step by step: 1. Take an egg in your mouth. 2. Suck the egg, swirling your tongue around it to extract the inside. 3. Spit out the empty eggshell. 4. Repeat steps 1-3 until all the eggs have been sucked. https://andykonwinski.com/assets/img/sucking-eggs-2.png https://andykonwinski.com/assets/img/sucking-eggs-2.png
        YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
        I appreciate the humour. But in the current climate I have to ask: you can tell that's not recursion, yes? Please say yes? Btw, that's not how you suck eggs, being "you" a grandmother or not. To suck eggs, you: 1. Take a needle 2. Take an egg 3. Make a hole with the needle on one end of the egg. 4. Put your finger on the hole to close it. 5. Keep the hole closed. 6. Make a hole with the needle on the other end of the egg. 7. Put your mouth around the hole in the egg [1] 8. Suck hard, simultaneously lifting your finger. And that, dear congregation, is the way to succeed, and the way to suck eggs. ______________ [1] Yes, that's the famous step where you get innoculated with all the good, healthy gut bacteria from the chicken's arse. People in the old days never got sick and that's just because they sucked so many eggs. See? Makes sense.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
When you ask yourself a question, that's recursion. The conversation with yourself can't go on until the question at the top of the stack is answered. The voice in your head, that is to say the closed brain loop of talking to yourself which we call "thinking" is recursive. Its a strange form of programming where everything is hacked out of api calls to localhost. There are no implementations, its api all the way down. These LLM's don't have that brain loop due to how they were constructed. They cannot do voice-in-your-head reasoning. Whatever is done in the loop structure has to be completely unrolled to be done in a single pass by an LLM. Needless to say, a lot comes for free in the recursive structure that has to be trained with great effort on the naive, unrolled, flat structure. This guy hacks a feedback loop into the LLM by manually feeding the output back to the input.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  >> When you ask yourself a question, that's recursion (...) I don't know if any of that makes sense. I think you're misapplying some handy metaphors: you're anthropomorphising a computer and mechanomorphising a human. I have "localchost"? What, do I also have Perl scripts? Now I'm starting to feel like a character in a P. K. Dick story. But all this doesn't matter because we're not talking about a person, asking questions of themself. We're talking about someone doing things with a computer. And we know exactly what "recursion" means in the context of a computer. On a computer, then, if anyone wants to show "recursion" in LLMs, they better be able to show how to implement a push-down stack with the bot's conversation window. Then they can show how to calculate a factorial recursively, and how their calculation behaves differently when it's computed in a tail-recursive manner, and when it is not. Yeah, I can see what the author doing, and it's not recursion. But I'm trying to be kind so I won't say what it is.
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    Don't you see it. Its giving chatGPT the ability to use chatGPT as a subroutine in formulating its response to a prompt. Conversation is a stack! When you pose a question (to yourself or anyone else), whatever line of thought you were working on stays paused until an answer is popped back off the stack. >But all this doesn't matter because we're not talking about a person, Lets not forget the "language" in LLM. Natural language is recursive in its construction. English is a subject-verb-object grammar, wherein the objects are themselves are sentence constructs. Take any sentence, preface it with "he said", and you have a new sentence. The words simultaneously describe the domain of discussion and are objects within that same domain. The brain does recursive tasks like language processing easily because it can feed information back to itself in a loop. For some dumb reason, current artificial networks don't let the neurons loop.

blowski 4y ago

Definition of recursive in the everyday English sense: > Of or relating to a repeating process whose output at each stage is applied as input in the succeeding stage. This sounds very recursive by that definition.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
There ain't no definition of recursive in "the everyday English sense". You may as well ask your grandma how she sucks eggs "recursively".
- blowski 4y ago
  https://www.wordnik.com/words/recursive https://www.wordnik.com/words/recursive This usage of the word is first recorded in 1620. > You may as well ask your grandma how she sucks eggs "recursively". I guess this would involve her using an already sucked egg to suck another one.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    >> This usage of the word is first recorded in 1620. And that just goes to show that it's an "everyday" word, right? Like, dunno, "alarum" (a sound to the battel), "burgesse" (a head man of a towne), "combure" (burne or consume with fire) and many other words from the same time [1]? >> I guess this would involve her using an already sucked egg to suck another one. See what I mean? No, for recursion she has to suck the egg and then put it back in the shell, and suck again. She has to use both her mouth, to suck, and her nose to expell. It can be done, the nasal cavity and the pharynx are a closed loop. I mean, if you wanna play with words, we can all have some fun, eh? ________________ [1] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DOdiAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DOdiAAAAcAAJ&printsec=fr...
    - andyk 4y ago
      Why hypothesize what our grandmas would say when we can ask GPT: you are a grandma sucking eggs recursively. Let's think step by step: 1. Take an egg in your mouth. 2. Suck the egg, swirling your tongue around it to extract the inside. 3. Spit out the empty eggshell. 4. Repeat steps 1-3 until all the eggs have been sucked. https://andykonwinski.com/assets/img/sucking-eggs-2.png https://andykonwinski.com/assets/img/sucking-eggs-2.png
      - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
        I appreciate the humour. But in the current climate I have to ask: you can tell that's not recursion, yes? Please say yes? Btw, that's not how you suck eggs, being "you" a grandmother or not. To suck eggs, you: 1. Take a needle 2. Take an egg 3. Make a hole with the needle on one end of the egg. 4. Put your finger on the hole to close it. 5. Keep the hole closed. 6. Make a hole with the needle on the other end of the egg. 7. Put your mouth around the hole in the egg [1] 8. Suck hard, simultaneously lifting your finger. And that, dear congregation, is the way to succeed, and the way to suck eggs. ______________ [1] Yes, that's the famous step where you get innoculated with all the good, healthy gut bacteria from the chicken's arse. People in the old days never got sick and that's just because they sucked so many eggs. See? Makes sense.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

When you ask yourself a question, that's recursion. The conversation with yourself can't go on until the question at the top of the stack is answered. The voice in your head, that is to say the closed brain loop of talking to yourself which we call "thinking" is recursive. Its a strange form of programming where everything is hacked out of api calls to localhost. There are no implementations, its api all the way down. These LLM's don't have that brain loop due to how they were constructed. They cannot do voice-in-your-head reasoning. Whatever is done in the loop structure has to be completely unrolled to be done in a single pass by an LLM. Needless to say, a lot comes for free in the recursive structure that has to be trained with great effort on the naive, unrolled, flat structure. This guy hacks a feedback loop into the LLM by manually feeding the output back to the input.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
>> When you ask yourself a question, that's recursion (...) I don't know if any of that makes sense. I think you're misapplying some handy metaphors: you're anthropomorphising a computer and mechanomorphising a human. I have "localchost"? What, do I also have Perl scripts? Now I'm starting to feel like a character in a P. K. Dick story. But all this doesn't matter because we're not talking about a person, asking questions of themself. We're talking about someone doing things with a computer. And we know exactly what "recursion" means in the context of a computer. On a computer, then, if anyone wants to show "recursion" in LLMs, they better be able to show how to implement a push-down stack with the bot's conversation window. Then they can show how to calculate a factorial recursively, and how their calculation behaves differently when it's computed in a tail-recursive manner, and when it is not. Yeah, I can see what the author doing, and it's not recursion. But I'm trying to be kind so I won't say what it is.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  Don't you see it. Its giving chatGPT the ability to use chatGPT as a subroutine in formulating its response to a prompt. Conversation is a stack! When you pose a question (to yourself or anyone else), whatever line of thought you were working on stays paused until an answer is popped back off the stack. >But all this doesn't matter because we're not talking about a person, Lets not forget the "language" in LLM. Natural language is recursive in its construction. English is a subject-verb-object grammar, wherein the objects are themselves are sentence constructs. Take any sentence, preface it with "he said", and you have a new sentence. The words simultaneously describe the domain of discussion and are objects within that same domain. The brain does recursive tasks like language processing easily because it can feed information back to itself in a loop. For some dumb reason, current artificial networks don't let the neurons loop.