Hi, I’m Eric and I work at a big chip company making chips and such! I do math for a job, but it’s cold hard stochastic optimization that makes people who know names like Tychonoff and Sylow weep.

My pfp is Hank Azaria in Heat, but you already knew that.

  • 5 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
Cake day: January 22nd, 2024
  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024English
    9·
    7 days ago

    Me: Hey, can you help me with the following? I just went into my basement and the powers out down here, all the lights are off. I am staring at my fuse box. There are 3 switches, 1 will restore the power to the whole house, and the other 2 aren’t attached to anything. I don’t want to go up and down the stairs multiple times, how do I identify which switch works with the fewest number of trips?

    Clauderino:

    This is a classic logic puzzle! I can help you solve this problem efficiently. Here’s how you can identify the correct switch with just two trips:

    First trip:

    Flip one switch (let’s call it Switch A) and leave it on for a few minutes. Then turn it off and flip a second switch (Switch B), leaving it on. Go upstairs to check the lights.

    Second trip: Return to the basement and observe the situation. Now, here’s how to interpret what you see:

    If the lights are on: Switch B is the correct one. If the lights are off and the bulbs are warm: Switch A is the correct one. If the lights are off and the bulbs are cool: The third switch © that you didn’t touch is the correct one.

    This method works because:

    If the lights are on, it must be the switch you left on (B). If Switch A was correct, the lights would have been on for a few minutes, warming up the bulbs, but would be off when you check. If neither A nor B worked, it must be the untouched switch ©.

    This way, you can determine the correct switch with just two trips up and down the stairs.

    Me: Why would I go upstairs at all? If I flip the right switch, I’ll immediately know because power will be restored in the basement.

    Clauderino: Thank you for catching that error. It’s a good reminder to always consider the specific details of a problem rather than applying a generic solution.

    Edit: I actually tried a variant on the Monty hall problem with a dummy 4th door that had nothing to do with anything, and Claude correctly identified that it had nothing to do with the situation :O. But then I repeated the same prompt and it got it wrong, so you know, stochastic nonsense :p

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsOPtoSneerClub@awful.systems•OAI employees channel the spirit of Marvin MinskyEnglish
    20·
    9 days ago

    Reasoning There is not a well known way to achieve system 2 thinking, but I am quite confident that it is possible within the transformer paradigm with the technology and compute we have available to us right now. I estimate that we are 2-3 years away from building a mechanism for system 2 thinking which is sufficiently good for the cycle I described above.

    Wow, what are the odds! The exact same transformer paradigm that OAI co-opted from Google is also the key to solving ‘system 2’ reasoning, meta cognition, recursive self improvement, and the symbol grounding problem! All they need is a couple trillion more dollars of VC Invesment, a couple of goat sacrifices here and there, and AGI will just fall out. They definitely aren’t tossing cash into a bottomless money pit chasing a dead-end architecture!

    … right?