3 ms·

Speed can be learned though...chess for example.

roenxi 2y ago
It isn't really possible to learn calculation speed, learning is about memorising shortcuts and heuristics, or perhaps how to spot them. And training to avoid waste. Strategic questions. Consider calculating 1+1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1... (= 2). It doesn't matter how quickly someone attempts to multiply an infinite number of 1s they will never succeed because infinity is too large. They have to notice a shortcut that lets them skip doing all the calculations. That shows the difference between calculation speed and happening upon a superior strategy. But people who can calculate very quickly will have a lot of opportunities to come up with a successful strategy because they can try more in what time they have.
- 11101010001100 2y ago
  This is exactly what happens in chess... for instance trading into a known winning endgame.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    this was exactly what I thought of and couldn’t articulate it this briefly - particularly pattern recognition and muscle memory in physical chess. It looks crazy when you see it, but the “tricks” are rote. I play mostly 5m chess because I’m a much faster thinker than I am at depth, and a lot of it is just trained speed since I was a young kid. When you see a particular pattern 50,000 times there are people that are good at just immediately making that synapse connect in their head as to the next move, without thinking, I believe this factor is called “intuition” sometimes on accident. It’s definitely a gift to learn though that I think is often confused with deep intelligence sometimes - which explains certain chess types well too. I am often confused for the latter type when I definitely am not - I think those type of intelligences are better at specialization whereas I’m more of a generalist because I can juggle a lot of things at once. They’re both very different types of intelligence that cannot be measured by iq tests, which is why I tend to scoff at what use they are and their usability in predicting outcomes. Trying to then take this flawed approach and apply it to AI is ludicrous and completely jumping the shark to me. You want to take a flawed measure of human intelligence that we also dont understand fully, and apply it to a machine that we also dont really understand? Ok, then miss me when I laugh at that kind of talk, it is just so silly. This is a more general rant in this broader thread and not directed at anyone spefifically.
    - godelski 2y ago
      I think you would enjoy the book Moonwalking With Einstein. The author is a journalist who's interested in memory competitions and while interviewing he ends up training with these people. Of course, learning that these are skills that surprisingly most people can lean. I think it's really eye opening into what we can do. The guy trains a year and wins the US competition, moving on to represent the US in a world competition. I think anyone would be impressed if you saw someone memorize a deck of cards in under 2 minutes. But maybe the most astonishing thing is that we are all capable of this but very few can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  when I was a kid, I had a unique gift for numbers and breaking them down into primes that led me to somehow competing on the county level for these weird speed-math challenges that were popular when I was young. I remember using a lot of tricks. Being able to quickly break down a number into primes by rote memorization was a thing I specifically remember being trained on. There are a lot of number tricks out there that you can train and speed yourself up. this made me quite successful in certain games of chance and odds based games that require quick mental arithmetic when I was younger. Some of it requires mathematical insight, for sure, to derive insight that leads to more speed - but arithmetic can be trained for sure.
  - godelski 2y ago
    This also matches a lot about what we know about the brain and recall. It is a demonstrable phenomena. Just like how any athlete has quicker reflexes. Sure, some might be innate, but their training definitely makes it faster. Information is information. I mean we all go on "autopilot" at times. Much more frequently in things we do frequently. That's kinda a state of high recall. Not much thinking needs to be done. A great example of this might be a speed cuber, someone who solves rubix cubes fast. Clearly they didn't start that fast.

It isn't really possible to learn calculation speed, learning is about memorising shortcuts and heuristics, or perhaps how to spot them. And training to avoid waste. Strategic questions. Consider calculating 1+1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1... (= 2). It doesn't matter how quickly someone attempts to multiply an infinite number of 1s they will never succeed because infinity is too large. They have to notice a shortcut that lets them skip doing all the calculations. That shows the difference between calculation speed and happening upon a superior strategy. But people who can calculate very quickly will have a lot of opportunities to come up with a successful strategy because they can try more in what time they have.

11101010001100 2y ago
This is exactly what happens in chess... for instance trading into a known winning endgame.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  this was exactly what I thought of and couldn’t articulate it this briefly - particularly pattern recognition and muscle memory in physical chess. It looks crazy when you see it, but the “tricks” are rote. I play mostly 5m chess because I’m a much faster thinker than I am at depth, and a lot of it is just trained speed since I was a young kid. When you see a particular pattern 50,000 times there are people that are good at just immediately making that synapse connect in their head as to the next move, without thinking, I believe this factor is called “intuition” sometimes on accident. It’s definitely a gift to learn though that I think is often confused with deep intelligence sometimes - which explains certain chess types well too. I am often confused for the latter type when I definitely am not - I think those type of intelligences are better at specialization whereas I’m more of a generalist because I can juggle a lot of things at once. They’re both very different types of intelligence that cannot be measured by iq tests, which is why I tend to scoff at what use they are and their usability in predicting outcomes. Trying to then take this flawed approach and apply it to AI is ludicrous and completely jumping the shark to me. You want to take a flawed measure of human intelligence that we also dont understand fully, and apply it to a machine that we also dont really understand? Ok, then miss me when I laugh at that kind of talk, it is just so silly. This is a more general rant in this broader thread and not directed at anyone spefifically.
  - godelski 2y ago
    I think you would enjoy the book Moonwalking With Einstein. The author is a journalist who's interested in memory competitions and while interviewing he ends up training with these people. Of course, learning that these are skills that surprisingly most people can lean. I think it's really eye opening into what we can do. The guy trains a year and wins the US competition, moving on to represent the US in a world competition. I think anyone would be impressed if you saw someone memorize a deck of cards in under 2 minutes. But maybe the most astonishing thing is that we are all capable of this but very few can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein
JohnMakin 2y ago
when I was a kid, I had a unique gift for numbers and breaking them down into primes that led me to somehow competing on the county level for these weird speed-math challenges that were popular when I was young. I remember using a lot of tricks. Being able to quickly break down a number into primes by rote memorization was a thing I specifically remember being trained on. There are a lot of number tricks out there that you can train and speed yourself up. this made me quite successful in certain games of chance and odds based games that require quick mental arithmetic when I was younger. Some of it requires mathematical insight, for sure, to derive insight that leads to more speed - but arithmetic can be trained for sure.
- godelski 2y ago
  This also matches a lot about what we know about the brain and recall. It is a demonstrable phenomena. Just like how any athlete has quicker reflexes. Sure, some might be innate, but their training definitely makes it faster. Information is information. I mean we all go on "autopilot" at times. Much more frequently in things we do frequently. That's kinda a state of high recall. Not much thinking needs to be done. A great example of this might be a speed cuber, someone who solves rubix cubes fast. Clearly they didn't start that fast.