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Machines have been better than humans at chess for decades. Yet no one cares. Everyone's busy watching Magnus Carlsen. We are human. This means we care about
by cynicalpeace 2y ago
Machines have been better than humans at chess for decades.
Yet no one cares. Everyone's busy watching Magnus Carlsen.
We are human. This means we care about what other humans do. We only care about machines insofar as it serves us.
This principle is broadly extensible to work and art. Humans will always have a place in these realms as long as humans are around.
- awahab92 2y agomagnus carlsen basically quit because computers ruined chess. As did kasparov. Fischer was probably the last great player who was unassisted by tools.
- hyperbovine 2y ago?? Carlsen is very much active -- look up the YouTube channel EpicChess for an extremely entertaining recap of what he's up to recently.
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoCarlsen plays still at the highest level. He just didn't want to do the world championship anymore, wasn't worth the effort after winning it so many times.
- camjw 2y agoSure but if an AI can prove e.g the Goldbach conjecture then that is a bfd.
- hyperbovine 2y agoWhat if the proof were incomprehensible to humans?
- camjw 2y agoI think that is unlikely to be the case - the classic example of a proof that human's "can't understand" is the Four Colour Theorem, but thats because the proof is a reduction to like 100000 special cases which are checked by computer. To what extent is the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem "incomprehensible to humans" because only like a dozen people on the planet could truly understand it - I don't know. The point of new proofs is really to learn new things about mathematics, and I'm sure we would learn something from a proof of Goldbach's conjecture. Finally if it's not peer reviewed then its not a real proof eh.
- hyperbovine 2y agoI think the 4-color theorem is rather different though. It reduced to a large number of cases that can in principle each be verified by a human, if they were so inclined (indeed a few intrepid mathematicians have done so over the years, at least partially.) The point of using a computer was to reduce drudgery, not to prove highly non-obvious things. Thinking back to Wiles' proof of FLT, it took the community several years of intense work just to verify/converge on the correct result. And that proof is ~130 pages. So, what if the computer produced a provably correct, 4000-page proof of the Goldbach conjecture?
- steego 2y agoIt shouldn’t count. We need to require it be able to ELI5 the proof to Goldbach’s conjecture to an actual class of graduating kindergartners.
- fanatic2pope 2y agoIf it cannot explain how it was proven, was it actually proven?
- cynicalpeace 2y agoNo. Funny how these discussions too often devolve into semantics lol.
- auggierose 2y agoFunny how people don't understand basic logic. If it is a proof in a logic, and the machine checked that proof, it is a proof, no matter that no human actually understands it. A human doesn't need to understand the proof, they just have to understand why the proof is a proof.
- moffkalast 2y agoWell... assuming a human made no mistakes setting up that logic.
- auggierose 2y agoOf course. That falls under "understanding why the proof is a proof".
- throwaway290 2y agoNow we only need to find that human that never makes mistakes and we're golden...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- auggierose 2y agoLuckily, that is not necessary. You can make many mistakes, until you arrive at a logic you are happy with. Then you talk with other humans about it, and eventually you will all agree, that to the best of your knowledge, there is no mistake in the logic. If you pick first-order logic, that has already been done for you. Then you need to implement that logic in software, and again, you can and will mistakes here. You will use the first version of that software, or another logic software, to verify that your informal thoughts why your logic implementation is correct, can be formalised and checked. You will find mistakes, and fix them, and check that your correctness proof still goes through. It is very unlikely that it won't, but if it doesn't, you fix your correctness proof. If you can indeed fix it, you are done, no mistakes remain. If you cannot, something must be wrong with your implementation, so rinse and repeat. At the end of this, you have a logic, and a logic implementation, which doesn't contain any mistakes. Guaranteed.
- humansareok1 2y agoIf we can formally verify the proof then it doesn't matter. Often the implications on other problems is substantial just knowing the proof exists.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoHow is that a counterpoint?
- christianqchung 2y ago> This principle is broadly extensible to work and art Nah, as a consumer it makes no difference to me if a meat packing factory or Amazon warehouse employs 5000 or 5 people. To art, this principle is totally real, but for work, it only applies to some/most of it.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoRead the next sentence: "We only care about machines insofar as it serves us." Imagine a machine doing "work" that only serves itself and other machines that does no service to humanity. It would have no economic value. In fact the whole concept of "work" only makes sense if it is assigned economic value by humans.
- christianqchung 2y agoThen we agree, but your chess example made it sound like if a machine could automatically pack meat with little human intervention, people wouldn't want it. That's also not the next sentence. How is it broadly applicable to work?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- smokel 2y ago> Everyone's busy watching Magnus Carlsen. Actually, I was looking up Elo ratings of the top computer chess players, and learned that it is not that trivial to compare these, due to differences in hardware requirements and whatnot.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoAre you arguing computer chess players are as popular as human chess players?
- smokel 2y agoNot at all. I just tripped over your black-and-white presentation of things, and thought it might be helpful to provide some counterbalance.
- zone411 2y agoI don't think this principle extends to math proofs. It's much, much easier to verify a proof than to create it, and a second proof will just be a footnote. Not many mathematicians will want to work on that. That said, there is a lot of distance between IMO and the frontiers of research math.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoWhy does it not extend to math proofs?
- ertgbnm 2y agoI'm sure humans will always enjoy chess and art regardless of how much better AI is at it. In the same way, there will probably always be mathematic hobbyist who study math for fun. But I seriously doubt that in the near future there will be mathematicians who will be publishing new advancements that aren't mostly or entirely discovered by AI. A human might get credit for a proof for asking the initial question, but there is pretty much no world where a computer can easily solve a meaningful mathematical problem but we insist on a human solve it more slowly and expensively instead.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoMy point was where does the concept of "meaningful" come from? The proof will only have value if it's meaningful to us.
- auggierose 2y agoThere are people that believe that mathematics is actually useful, in ways that chess or art are not. I know, most mathematicians don't think so. But let us just entertain this crazy thought for a moment. Then a proof is just a tool that tells us, oh, we have applied this piece of mathematics right. No understanding of the proof is actually required for that, and no one cares if some mathematician somewhere actually fully understands the proof. It will be OK, even expected, that the machine is better than us at finding and checking proofs.
- bongodongobob 2y agoEh, people definitely care. AI has completely changed chess. Non viable lines have been proven viable and vice versa. All the pros study and develop new lines with AI.