5 ms·

The steam engine was invented and the 100m dash is now a solved problem.

by xeonmc 2y ago

reaperman 2y ago
Normally I dislike these quips for HN; I hate that I love this one.
dredmorbius 2y ago
A far more apropos comparison would be the internal combustion engine and the horse, in a military context. Though sticking with steam engines, military logistics advantaged over a wagon caravan. The question here isn't a casual guessing game, but threat models (as directly addressed in TFA), and general informational hygiene.
- xnickb 2y ago
  I fail to see the drastic change here. AI was used for this in the past as well. The difference is far from that between steam and combustion engines.
colordrops 2y ago
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  Isn’t a human brain an organic computer? I find the human brain very interesting. The most interesting thing I know of in the universe.
  - xnickb 2y ago
    Religious people claim it's merely a communication device, and the computer is elsewhere. Clearly one's interpretation is a function of the paradigm one exists in.
    - riidom 2y ago
      Thin client theory?
      - xnickb 2y ago
        It's more of a hypothesis in this case. And some are clearly thicker than others. But that's details.
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      > Religious people claim it's merely a communication device, and the computer is elsewhere. No, that is a seriously weird and imaginary perversion that you've invented, unless you have some citation to a doctrine. Christians do not consider body organs as "devices" nor do our churches teach doctrine on "external computers", if you refer to the Holy Trinity as such? Are you thinking of Latter-Day Saints mythology, or Scientology? Your description is quite reductive in many aspects, including temporality and misuse of technical nomenclature. Thanks for telling religious people what we think and claim, though, and thanks for the amazing overgeneralized blanket dismissal. In fact, humans used to be called "Computers" in terms of their job roles, that is, a human in an office was given math/physics problems to solve, and they'd use tools such as slide rule, paper and pencil to "compute" those problems and solve them. There was more than one example of a fantasy "panopticon" by which a central observer or observers could watch everything going on, for example in a prison facility, and those observers could report findings to human computers, who would process the data and submit it up to the authorities, for meta-analysis and taking action on new developments or trends.
      - swat535 2y ago
        Not to put words in the parent’s mouth, but I think they were pointing to the idea of the soul or consciousness, concepts that mean very different things in religious vs. scientific contexts. One sees it as an immaterial essence; the other as an emergent property of the brain.
      - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
        I believe they are referring to the soul. The soul according to doctrine does not exist inside the body for it can exist after the body's destruction.
  - SecretDreams 2y ago
    I think growing a baby from nothing is pretty nifty, but brains are up there too.
    - cj 2y ago
      A brain that replicates itself is indeed nifty!
  - AIPedant 2y ago
    I don’t think “organic computer” is a good way to think of a brain. The fact that human brains + some scratch paper can implement any Turing-complete model of computation is very interesting. But that’s not true of chimpanzee brains or orca brains or crow brains, all of which belong to intelligent, thinking animals. Going the other way, it’s not clear that a Turing-complete model of computation can tractably implement (say) crow cognition. Turing machines can solve arbitrary systems of Schrödinger equations, so theoretically we could simulate every atom in a crow’s body and get an AI crow[1]. But that’s obviously intractable for any known physical computer, and would remain intractable even if we moved to proteins rather than atoms. So are there higher-order “primitives” of crow cognition that can be implemented on a Turing machine? Or is the problem akin to integration, where neat “symbolic” solutions are impossible for most brains, and only “numeric” approaches work? [1] This is also true for humans: even if you take a loopy quantum consciousness approach, AGI is theoretically possible. Sometimes you see people arguing against AGI on the grounds of Gödel-incompleteness, but this is a mystical nonsense understanding of what Gödel actually proved.
layman51 2y ago
GeoGuessr is also not a “solved problem” in the sense that if you give the model a photo of an outdoor location that is not covered by Google Street View, then it will just make an educated guess which might still be many kilometers away.
- defrost 2y ago
  Much of the interior of Western Australia (an area 3x the size of Texas) can be divided into very few cells which essentially look near identical in all directions, coupled with few roads for the area and not much in the way of uploaded snaps coverage. There's a lot of flat lands with spinifex in certain areas (easily a couple of United Kingdoms in size) and even a touch of mesa won't help narrow a location down from the general are as there are many of those with identical edge profiles. But sure "Pilbara", "Kimberley", "Wheatbelt" can be geo guessed .. it's a real challenge to narrow down (I spent some time doing wet film photogrammetry prior to sheperding in WGS84 differential GPS locating and digital film and multi spectral geophysical aquisition). No so hard if there's a few relatively unique man made features.
  - marxisttemp 2y ago
    Because seem like someone who might have an interesting answer: A GeoGuessr player, GeoWizard, has done a few “straight line challenges”, where he attempts to walk across a country in as straight a line as possible, usually planning beforehand with Google Earth and PostGIS. This got me thinking of what could fairly be thought of as “crossing”, since obviously you couldn’t describe e.g. walking from one side of Florida to the other as “crossing the USA”. My best thought was to set the ending point of the line by following the border of the country in each direction til they met on the other side. To avoid the fractal coastline problem, use the challenger’s stride length as the unit of measure for the border. But perhaps there is a better, more rigorous way of defining the opposite point on the edge of an arbitrary polygon.
    - defrost 2y ago
      As an abstract geometric problem the greatest width of an abstract polygon in a Euclidean 2D plane is found be looking at the greatest distance between all pairs of parallel lines that have been pulled together to clamp the polygon. The maximal diameter as opposed to the minimal waist. Some might then say that "crossing" that polygon is to travel that longest line across the greatest width. This simplistically avoids the question of concave polygons, complex polgons with exclusions (the Vatican state is removed from the Italian contry bounds), polgon collections (the nation of Fiji has many islands and can be tricky to traverse on foot .. not forgetting that perhaps the longest diameter might be from one island to another with no other islands between). There's also the challenge of parallel lines on a 2D 'spherical' manifold, the almost spherical abstract ellipsoid of earth (or very non ellipsoidal Geoid if we take a constant gravitation value as the surface). On such manifolds lines are Great Circles (more or less) and always intersect. Still, lets just say you're looking for the longest walkable(?) great circle path across a country that might go outside that country and perhaps is best travelled by a crop duster at 80m ground clearance to avoid getting feet wet. The challenge itself takes some posing. Meanwhile, less abstractly, I do like a jolly that "crosses a country" in a manner accepted by a (Wo)Man on a Clapham omnibus. eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Davidson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Davidson only went "half way", but that was accepted as an epic crossing. https://thelongridersguild.com/stories/stef-gebbie.htm https://thelongridersguild.com/stories/stef-gebbie.htm "only" crossed most of the E-W distance across the lower portion of the country, while https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-03/french-woman-conquers-australian-bush-with-brumbies/100038450 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-03/french-woman-conquers... travelled North - South, the long bit, but not quite coast to coast ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicentennial_National_Trail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicentennial_National_Trail ).
paxys 2y ago
Just like how chess engines ended competitive chess as people were predicting at the time.

The steam engine was invented and the 100m dash is now a solved problem.

by xeonmc 2y ago

The steam engine was invented and the 100m dash is now a solved problem.

reaperman 2y ago

Normally I dislike these quips for HN; I hate that I love this one.

dredmorbius 2y ago

A far more apropos comparison would be the internal combustion engine and the horse, in a military context. Though sticking with steam engines, military logistics advantaged over a wagon caravan. The question here isn't a casual guessing game, but threat models (as directly addressed in TFA), and general informational hygiene.

xnickb 2y ago
I fail to see the drastic change here. AI was used for this in the past as well. The difference is far from that between steam and combustion engines.

colordrops 2y ago

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

Mistletoe 2y ago
Isn’t a human brain an organic computer? I find the human brain very interesting. The most interesting thing I know of in the universe.
- xnickb 2y ago
  Religious people claim it's merely a communication device, and the computer is elsewhere. Clearly one's interpretation is a function of the paradigm one exists in.
  - riidom 2y ago
    Thin client theory?
    - xnickb 2y ago
      It's more of a hypothesis in this case. And some are clearly thicker than others. But that's details.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    > Religious people claim it's merely a communication device, and the computer is elsewhere. No, that is a seriously weird and imaginary perversion that you've invented, unless you have some citation to a doctrine. Christians do not consider body organs as "devices" nor do our churches teach doctrine on "external computers", if you refer to the Holy Trinity as such? Are you thinking of Latter-Day Saints mythology, or Scientology? Your description is quite reductive in many aspects, including temporality and misuse of technical nomenclature. Thanks for telling religious people what we think and claim, though, and thanks for the amazing overgeneralized blanket dismissal. In fact, humans used to be called "Computers" in terms of their job roles, that is, a human in an office was given math/physics problems to solve, and they'd use tools such as slide rule, paper and pencil to "compute" those problems and solve them. There was more than one example of a fantasy "panopticon" by which a central observer or observers could watch everything going on, for example in a prison facility, and those observers could report findings to human computers, who would process the data and submit it up to the authorities, for meta-analysis and taking action on new developments or trends.
    - swat535 2y ago
      Not to put words in the parent’s mouth, but I think they were pointing to the idea of the soul or consciousness, concepts that mean very different things in religious vs. scientific contexts. One sees it as an immaterial essence; the other as an emergent property of the brain.
    - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
      I believe they are referring to the soul. The soul according to doctrine does not exist inside the body for it can exist after the body's destruction.
- SecretDreams 2y ago
  I think growing a baby from nothing is pretty nifty, but brains are up there too.
  - cj 2y ago
    A brain that replicates itself is indeed nifty!
- AIPedant 2y ago
  I don’t think “organic computer” is a good way to think of a brain. The fact that human brains + some scratch paper can implement any Turing-complete model of computation is very interesting. But that’s not true of chimpanzee brains or orca brains or crow brains, all of which belong to intelligent, thinking animals. Going the other way, it’s not clear that a Turing-complete model of computation can tractably implement (say) crow cognition. Turing machines can solve arbitrary systems of Schrödinger equations, so theoretically we could simulate every atom in a crow’s body and get an AI crow[1]. But that’s obviously intractable for any known physical computer, and would remain intractable even if we moved to proteins rather than atoms. So are there higher-order “primitives” of crow cognition that can be implemented on a Turing machine? Or is the problem akin to integration, where neat “symbolic” solutions are impossible for most brains, and only “numeric” approaches work? [1] This is also true for humans: even if you take a loopy quantum consciousness approach, AGI is theoretically possible. Sometimes you see people arguing against AGI on the grounds of Gödel-incompleteness, but this is a mystical nonsense understanding of what Gödel actually proved.

layman51 2y ago

GeoGuessr is also not a “solved problem” in the sense that if you give the model a photo of an outdoor location that is not covered by Google Street View, then it will just make an educated guess which might still be many kilometers away.

defrost 2y ago
Much of the interior of Western Australia (an area 3x the size of Texas) can be divided into very few cells which essentially look near identical in all directions, coupled with few roads for the area and not much in the way of uploaded snaps coverage. There's a lot of flat lands with spinifex in certain areas (easily a couple of United Kingdoms in size) and even a touch of mesa won't help narrow a location down from the general are as there are many of those with identical edge profiles. But sure "Pilbara", "Kimberley", "Wheatbelt" can be geo guessed .. it's a real challenge to narrow down (I spent some time doing wet film photogrammetry prior to sheperding in WGS84 differential GPS locating and digital film and multi spectral geophysical aquisition). No so hard if there's a few relatively unique man made features.
- marxisttemp 2y ago
  Because seem like someone who might have an interesting answer: A GeoGuessr player, GeoWizard, has done a few “straight line challenges”, where he attempts to walk across a country in as straight a line as possible, usually planning beforehand with Google Earth and PostGIS. This got me thinking of what could fairly be thought of as “crossing”, since obviously you couldn’t describe e.g. walking from one side of Florida to the other as “crossing the USA”. My best thought was to set the ending point of the line by following the border of the country in each direction til they met on the other side. To avoid the fractal coastline problem, use the challenger’s stride length as the unit of measure for the border. But perhaps there is a better, more rigorous way of defining the opposite point on the edge of an arbitrary polygon.
  - defrost 2y ago
    As an abstract geometric problem the greatest width of an abstract polygon in a Euclidean 2D plane is found be looking at the greatest distance between all pairs of parallel lines that have been pulled together to clamp the polygon. The maximal diameter as opposed to the minimal waist. Some might then say that "crossing" that polygon is to travel that longest line across the greatest width. This simplistically avoids the question of concave polygons, complex polgons with exclusions (the Vatican state is removed from the Italian contry bounds), polgon collections (the nation of Fiji has many islands and can be tricky to traverse on foot .. not forgetting that perhaps the longest diameter might be from one island to another with no other islands between). There's also the challenge of parallel lines on a 2D 'spherical' manifold, the almost spherical abstract ellipsoid of earth (or very non ellipsoidal Geoid if we take a constant gravitation value as the surface). On such manifolds lines are Great Circles (more or less) and always intersect. Still, lets just say you're looking for the longest walkable(?) great circle path across a country that might go outside that country and perhaps is best travelled by a crop duster at 80m ground clearance to avoid getting feet wet. The challenge itself takes some posing. Meanwhile, less abstractly, I do like a jolly that "crosses a country" in a manner accepted by a (Wo)Man on a Clapham omnibus. eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Davidson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Davidson only went "half way", but that was accepted as an epic crossing. https://thelongridersguild.com/stories/stef-gebbie.htm https://thelongridersguild.com/stories/stef-gebbie.htm "only" crossed most of the E-W distance across the lower portion of the country, while https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-03/french-woman-conquers-australian-bush-with-brumbies/100038450 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-03/french-woman-conquers... travelled North - South, the long bit, but not quite coast to coast ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicentennial_National_Trail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicentennial_National_Trail ).

paxys 2y ago

Just like how chess engines ended competitive chess as people were predicting at the time.