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What makes you think your brain isn't also brute forcing potential solutions subconciously and only surfacing the useful results?
by nuc1e0n 11mo ago
What makes you think your brain isn't also brute forcing potential solutions subconciously and only surfacing the useful results?
- mkirsten 11mo agoCan you try calculating 101 * 70 in your head?
- hacker_homie 11mo agoI think therefore I am calculator?
- ang_cire 11mo agoUm, that's really easy to do in your head, there's no carrying or anything? 7,070 7 * 101 = 707 * 10 = 7,070 And computers don't brute-force multiplication either, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to the comment above?
- polotics 11mo agoI think it is very relevant, because no brute-forcing is involved in this solution.
- nutjob2 11mo agoThat's not true, the 'brute force' part is searching for a shortcut that works.
- numpy-thagoras 11mo agoThe brute force got reduced down to fast heuristics, like Arthur Benjamin's Mathemagics.
- jabbywocker 11mo agoIt’s almost like you’re proving the point of his reply…
- johnisgood 11mo agoVery easy to solve, just like it is easy to solve many other ones once you know the tricks. I recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Mental-Math-Mathemagicians-Calculation/dp/0307338401 https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Mental-Math-Mathemagicians-Ca...
- jabbywocker 11mo agoCompletely missing the point on purpose?
- johnisgood 11mo agoElaborate.
- jabbywocker 11mo agoyou don’t solve it by brute forcing possible solutions until one sticks
- johnisgood 11mo agoYeah, read it in another comment. Why do you think doing calculations in your head is brute-forcing? Many people can do it flawlessly, without even knowing of these "tricks". They just know. Is that brute-force?
- jabbywocker 11mo ago[flagged]
- johnisgood 11mo agoYou are not replying to what I said. I am not going to repeat myself, see the parent comment you replied to.
- froggit 11mo agoI can absolutely try this. Doesn't mean i'll solve it. If i solve it there's no guarantee i'll be correct. Math gets way harder when i don't have a legitimate need to do it. This falls in the "no legit need" so my mind went right to "100 * 70, good enough."
- NetMageSCW 11mo agoOr you could do (100 + 1)*70 => 100*70 + 1*70
- dbtc 11mo agoJust intuition ;)
- troupo 11mo agohuman brains are insanely powerful pattern matching and shortcut-taking machines. There's very little brute forcing going on.
- nutjob2 11mo agoYour second sentence contradicts your first.
- troupo 11mo agoPray tell how it contradicts the first. Just note: human pattern matching is not Haskell/Erlang/ML pattern matching. It doesn't go [1] through all possible matches of every possible combination of all available criteria [1] If it does, it's the most powerful computing device imaginable.
- antonvs 11mo ago> [1] If it does, it's the most powerful computing device imaginable. Well, my brain perhaps. Not sure about the rest of y'all.
- versteegen 11mo agoI 100% agree with nutjob :| There are hundreds of trillions of synapses in the brain, and much of what they do (IANANS) could reasonably be described as pattern matching: mostly sitting idle waiting for patterns. (Since dendritic trees perform a lot of computation (for example, combining inputs at each branch), if you want to count the number of pattern matchers in the branch you can't just count neurons. A neuron can recognise more than one pattern.) So yes, thanks to its insanely parallel architecture, the brain is also an insanely brute force pattern matcher, constantly matching against who knows how many trillions of previously seen patterns. (BTW IMHO this is why LLMs work so well) (I do recognise the gap in my argument: are all those neurons actually receiving inputs to match against, or are they 'gated'? But we're really just arguing about semantics of applying "brute force", a CS term, to a neural architecture, where it has no definition.)
- jodrellblank 11mo agoBecause I can solve problems that would take the age of the universe to brute force, without waiting the age of the universe. So can you: start counting at 1, increment the counter up to 10^8000, then print the counter value. Prolog: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... You and me instantly: 10^8000
- numpy-thagoras 11mo agoThere's a whole lot of undecidable (or effectively undecidable) edge cases that can be adequately covered. As a matter of fact, Decidability Logic is compatible with Prolog.
- nuc1e0n 11mo agoThe brain can still use other means of working in addition to brute forcing solutions. For example, how would you go about solving the chess puzzle of eight queens that doesn't involve going through the potential positions and then filtering out the options that don't match the criteria for the solution? Prolog can also evaluate mathematical expressions directly as well.