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AI Is Throwing a Roadside Picnic

23 points young_mete 1 hour ago 28 comments

Cpoll 1 hour ago | parent

Unrelated to the article: Roadside Picnic inspired a movie called Stalker, which in turn inspired the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series.

young_mete 1 hour ago | parent

Yep it's the OG literary version. Very much worth a read.

monomania 42 minutes ago | parent

I wasn't a big fan of the book, tbh. I love the movie though, it's one of my favorites.

sedan_baklazhan 35 minutes ago | parent

The movie is almost unrelated to the book. I really like the book though, even being as depressing as it is.

rjsw 1 hour ago | parent

Both of those are listed on the image of the book cover in the article.

1245-a17z 1 hour ago | parent

A new analogy for the HN audience that is susceptible to reinforcement learning applied to humans (daily)!

johnbonton 1 hour ago | parent

This rests on the (completely false) premise that AI is doing anything other than simply parroting our human knowledge back at us

It has no capacity to think, argue, demonstrate, or certainly do anything even remotely close to “intelligence”

young_mete 1 hour ago | parent

It doesn't assume, it just observes. It has the capacity to use computers better than us, more persistently, in a more scalable way, to solve problems we haven't solved before like Navier-Stokes and many more to come. You can argue all you want about whether it's intelligent or not and what it means, but the solution is now here for us to process, understand, and integrate forward into our model of the world.

johnbonton 32 minutes ago | parent

Completely false

asimpletune 1 hour ago | parent

> All this new knowledge is arriving at a pace much greater than the field’s ability to process it

That’s the whole issue: it’s not knowledge, it’s data. AI can not provide an account for the proofs, or be questioned about them, or organize a talk exposing the idea because there’s no understanding behind any of it.

This is what Tao has been saying; that the results, in the strictest sense, were never the goal. It is ultimately the understanding (that previously was required to form a proof) that is valuable.

young_mete 1 hour ago | parent

Fair, “answers” is probably more precise than “knowledge.” That gap between answers and understanding is the whole point of the post, so I think we mostly agree.

flowerlad 55 minutes ago | parent

Does that mean AI is not doing something useful? If it provides a proof, it gives direction to human mathematicians who can then develop an understanding, give talks, be questioned about the topic, and teach. Is that not a useful service?

McDyver 34 minutes ago | parent

I don't think that's the argument. In my opinion this is like paying to unlock characters, à la EA. Who's going to feel a sense of accomplishment by just trying to interpret what an LLM spat out? Sure,maybe the results will be used by someone in some field, the same way a product manager uses what the development team developed. Is the PM going to give talks about it? Are they going to expand on those developments and come up with something new?

flowerlad 3 minutes ago | parent

> Who's going to feel a sense of accomplishment by just trying to interpret what an LLM spat out?

I think you have a point, but this is the reality we have to face. The genie is out of the bottle. Even if OpenAI stops publishing AI-generated proofs, it's only a matter of months before tools with similar capabilities are in everyone's hands.

kurthr 18 minutes ago | parent

It might well be useful if the RIGHT proofs are evaluated and proven. Figuring out what will be useful has always been a real challenge in math. Finding certain symmetries and mappings between problems in different domains, might well be useful even if they aren't well understood? That has always been another part of the work of mathematicians. Of course there are those who just work on the beauty of things, and few in the 80s would have thought that prime factoring number theory or elliptic curves would be the basis for modern communications and banking.

That said, getting a point solution and not knowing the path to get there, is certainly much less useful, and generalization is much harder. Again, more work for mathematicians, but maybe without the easy "I solved it" proof metric for rewards. Goodhart's law strikes again.

ricardobeat 18 minutes ago | parent

Why wouldn’t the AI be able to answer questions about the proofs or organize a talk? Those are pretty much the things it excels at, exploring and summarizing previous knowledge. The problem is the volume of questions and data a human needs to step through to arrive at the same understanding.

kurthr 15 minutes ago | parent

Apparently, the knowledge isn't in the data set, and the explanations are gobbledygook. They certainly summarize well, but it seems that if the "understanding" isn't already baked in, then expanding the source description doesn't really clarify it. Maybe in the future?

ndriscoll 8 minutes ago | parent

What does apparently here mean? Is there an account of an expert sharing their attempts to get a model to explain the results and key ideas to them (for a topic they're familiar with) in an interactive session, and having it fail?

clickety_clack 16 minutes ago | parent

I guess the issue with that is that the understanding is important to mathematicians. The majority of people outside mathematics don’t understand it whether it’s humans doing the work or AI. If AI can generate useful results more quickly, then to the general public it is more valuable.

KolmogorovComp 59 minutes ago | parent

I can only recommend Strougastky brothers books’, I enjoyed ‘Hard to Be a God’ and wish to read more from them.

That is why I find the prospect of spoiling the plot without warning to be bad taste and didn’t finish the article.

sedan_baklazhan 28 minutes ago | parent

No real spoilers in the article though. Just one of the ideas revealed very early in the book.

sedan_baklazhan 49 minutes ago | parent

I highly recommend also reading the “Inhabited Island” as well as “Hard to be a God” by these authors. These books are brilliant as well.

young_mete 47 minutes ago | parent

I tried "Monday Begins on Saturday" and had a pretty hard time getting through it. But I have to give it another chance - and check out the ones you mentioned.

sedan_baklazhan 39 minutes ago | parent

Monday… is a very Russian book, heavily based on memes and folklore. You will have very hard time understanding it. I can’t recommend you to try it again.

The 2 books I’ve mentioned are very international on the contrary.

BTW, “The kid from hell” is also really good.

young_mete 34 minutes ago | parent

I am Russian, read it in the original. But I'm scarred by being forced to read meandering classics from a very young age, so I may just have a more visceral negative reaction to it that I have to get over.

m3047 7 minutes ago | parent

I like that metaphor. But what it calls to my mind is an "alien artifact" which was found by a road, and "how did these refined metals get placed inside of a rock, in such an unnatural formation?" and there was much debate about this artifact. Years later it was determined that it was in fact a spark plug which had been remineralized by the effluent from a mine upstream: an unusual process acting on a discarded object, and people who want to believe. Nobody thought that the remineralization process could take less than hundreds of years, which ruled out "spark plug".