Comment by stavros
10 hours ago
Then test Bob on what you actually want him to produce, ie novel problems, instead of trivial things that won't tell you how good he is.
Why is it a problem of the LLM if your test is unrelated to the performance you want?
How can Bob produce novel things when he lacks the skills to do even trivial things?
I didn't get to be a senior engineer by immediately being able to solve novel problems. I can now solve novel problems because I spent untold hours solving trivial ones.
Because trivial things aren't a prerequisite for novel things, as any theoretical mathematician who can't do long division will tell you.
I would love to see someone attempt to do multiplication who never learned addition, or exponentiation without having learned multiplication.
There is a vast difference between “never learned the skill,” and “forgot the skill from lack of use.” I learned how to do long division in school, decades ago. I sat down and tried it last year, and found myself struggling, because I hadn’t needed to do it in such a long time.
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That's not a good analogy. A good mathematician isn't necessarily dealing with calculations, i.e. long division, but rather with proof.
No-ones becomes a good mathematician without first learning to write simple proofs, and then later on more complex proof. It's the very stuff of the field itself.
There's a difference between needing no trivial skills to do novel things and not needing specific prerequisite trivial skills to do a novel thing
Ah yes. The famous theoretical mathematicians who immediately started on novel problems in theoretical mathematics without first learning and understanding a huge number of trivial things like how division works to begin with, what fractions are, what equations are and how they are solved etc.
Edit: let's look at a paper like Some Linear Transformations on Symmetric Functions Arising From a Formula of Thiel and Williams https://ecajournal.haifa.ac.il/Volume2023/ECA2023_S2A24.pdf and try and guess how many of trivial things were completely unneeded to write a paper like this.
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What people forget about programming is it is a notation for formal logic, one that can be executed by a machine. That formal logic is for solving a problem in the real world.
While we have a lot of abstractions that solve some subproblems, there still need to connect those solutions to solve the main problem. And there’s a point where this combination becomes its own technical challenge. And the skill that is needed is the same one as solving simpler problems with common algorithms.