Comment by TeMPOraL
2 days ago
> GP is saying that "the search space" of "the natural world" is much bigger than the search space of "stuff created on purpose by humans". In both cases, there will be guesswork, but in one case less.
I agree. What I am saying is, we have effective tools and processes for each of these search spaces, so code no longer being "created on purpose by humans" is not the end of the world.
> we have effective tools and processes for each of these search spaces
Do we? Science (the tool for the natural world) is limited and there's so much we don't understand.
The recent superhuman achievements by llms in math are promising, but what we've seen so far isn't enough imo to YOLO building arbitrarily large systems in code and just trust that the llms will be able to handle it. Especially when the stakes are high (human lives, etc).
> Do we? Science (the tool for the natural world) is limited and there's so much we don't understand.
Limited in what way? Its basic structure is sufficient to eventually let us discover anything there is to discover. It's a fully general problem solving framework.
> Limited in what way? Its basic structure is sufficient to eventually let us discover anything there is to discover. It's a fully general problem solving framework.
That "eventually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's limited in the most literal, empirical way. We don't have answers to most things. If we stood in relation to a gargantuan code base as we stand in relation to the natural world, with an equal proportion of known vs unknown, we'd be pretty screwed.
As an aside, even with the "eventually" qualifier, the claim isn't true. The generation of hypotheses, in particular, and even sometimes the experimental setups to test them, happens through an "out of band" process -- namely, human creativity and intuition. Which is effectively a computational process we don't understand, and limited in its own way (despite its incredible productions). The history of scientific breakthroughs is the history of astonishing insights out of nowhere, from the brains of individual people, sometimes literally from dreams. The experimental method provides a reliable way to test the insights more or less "mechanically", but it would be mostly impotent without the other part.