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This sort of thing makes me feel there is some deep understanding of reality only inches away from us, we glimpse it through these patterns but the secret remai
by wewewedxfgdf 1y ago
This sort of thing makes me feel there is some deep understanding of reality only inches away from us, we glimpse it through these patterns but the secret remains hidden.
- cyanydeez 1y agoMakes me feel like math is mostly an arbitrary realm that after you've got 90% of the way in, the remaining 10% is just pointless coincidences.
- _feus 1y agoand it will be something so trivial and obvious, those who were looking for it will be kicking themselves for missing it
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoIt’s a huge refrain that shows up again every 20 years or so. Wolfram wrote a huge book with this premise, but I don’t think it’s gone anywhere even though it’s surely 25 years old by now.
- robin_reala 1y agoYou can read it for free at https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/ if you’re interested.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoGEB was similar in a cycle prior. It's cool to dream but the limits of accepted knowledge requires the hard work of assembling data, evidence, and reasoning.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoIt's arguably ~2500 years old, dating back to the Pythagoreans, who believed that "all is number" and had a very large and complex system of musical rituals. The modern manifestation is mostly the intellectual product of Konrad Zuse, who wrote "digital physics" in 1969. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics Wolfram, Tegmark, Bostrom, etc. are mostly downstream of Zuse.
- CRConrad 1y ago> Konrad Zuse That...? Ah, yes, that Konrad Zuse.
- Kaijo 1y agoWolfram came to our evolutionary biology department to preach that book about 20 years ago. We all got our heads into cellular automata for a while, but in the end they just don't have the claimed profound explanatory power in real biological systems.
- e1ghtSpace 1y agohonestly this would be it, wouldn't it? https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/07fRJGiC51VEHPqYRfNaFjnEA https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/07fRJGiC51VEHPqYRfNaFjnEA
- lukan 1y agoDid you tried to share a hollywood action movie with us to tell us what exactly?
- e1ghtSpace 1y agoDid you listen? The audio is different yet it still works.
- lukan 1y agoNo, I did not download a big movie and likely won't to get a point on HN.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- e1ghtSpace 1y agoAll you want is points on HN when you comment? Anyway, try to only focus on the top middle screen in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_dLx_J2oVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_dLx_J2oVs
- lukan 1y agoYour point of argument/information. Not karma points.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- amelius 1y agoOr someone proves that there is no pattern and they will be kicking themselves for wasting their time searching.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThe experience gained along the journey is more valuable than the result.
- waltbosz 1y agoWouldn't it be fun if someone out there already knows a simple way to determine if a number is prime without factoring, but to them it is so obvious that they didn't even consider others may be interested.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y agoSince 2002 this has been known, and it's one of the least intuitive things in modern math. (versions with probability of 1-\epsilon have existed since Miller-Rabin in 1976)
- vasvir 1y agoWell I have a really elegant proof for this but I don't have enough space in the HN reply box to write it out -- but it is trivial, I am sure you will work it out. Fermat Reincarnation.
- CRConrad 1y ago> Fermat Reincarnation. Pascal, I think.
- kevinventullo 1y agoAs far as I know, the Lucas-Lehrer test used by GIMPS does not actually factor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas%E2%80%93Lehmer_primality_test https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas%E2%80%93Lehmer_primali...
- Someone 1y agoThat works for very few numbers. From that Wikipedia article: “In mathematics, the Lucas–Lehmer test (LLT) is a primality test for Mersenne numbers” That’s fine for GIMPS, which only searches for Mersenne primes, but doesn’t work in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primality_test#Fast_deterministic_tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primality_test#Fast_determinis... mentions several tests that do not require factorization, though.
- throwaway81523 1y ago
- briffid 1y agoI had a similar feeling. But I think this is indeed a glimpse to the intrinsic structure of reality itself, not just a promise of seeing reality. Like we can have a blink of turning around in Plato's cave. I think the patterns of the Mandelbrot set is a similar thing. And there are only a handful of other things that shows the very basic structure of reality. And the encouraging thing is that it seems the core of reality is not an infinite void.
- dcow 1y agoI don’t think this understanding will be related to the structure of reality but instead the structure of discrete math. Math is not an observed property of reality it’s a system of describing quantities and relations between them, often with plenty of practical application. Math is applied philosophy and physics is applied math.
- bmacho 1y agoDiscrete math is the single most "observed property of reality", and nothing else comes even close.
- swayvil 1y agoI for one never saw a "number 2" in the wild. But I'm a homebody.
- curtisblaine 1y agoI guess you saw two things in the wild though.
- alphazard 1y agoIf I handed you 1 apple, and then handed you another apple, you wouldn't be surprised to find that you had 2 apples. The same trick works with oranges and pears.
- verzali 1y agoBut not necessarily with rabbits. Can easily end up with dozens of 'em when you ony started out with two.
- brookst 1y agoWhoa
- FredPret 1y ago> If I handed you 1 apple, At this point I hold one object that we agree to label "apple". Note that even seeing it as a single object is a layer of abstraction. In reality it's a clump of fundamental particles temporarily banding together > and then handed you another apple, What's "another apple"? What does it have in common with the thing I'm already holding? We label this thing to be also an apple, but it's a totally different set of atoms, from a different tree, perhaps from the other side of the planet. Perhaps the atoms formed in stellar processes light years away from that of the other apple. Calling both of these things "apple" is a required first step to having two of them, but that is an of abstraction, a mental trick we use to simplify the world so we can represent it in our minds. I'm not a particle physicist but I hear electrons *can* be counted without any unwitting help from our lower-level neural circuitry.