Country A with a powerful military attacks its neighbouring country B with a weak military in order to expand its territory and gain access to resources. The population generally supports this attack, army A only attacks military targets, but army B stands no chance of repelling the attacking army and does not receive support from third parties.
In this specific situation, would we hold country B to the same standards or would we deem it acceptable if country B attacked non-military targets, civilian infrastructure, and in the extreme civilians? That does not necessarily mean that such actions would be desirable because of the resulting reaction. And there might also be higher order effects, for example a change in the understanding what is acceptable in such conflicts, that make such action undesirable in the longer term.
I have been wondering for some time if terrorism is considered acceptable in certain situations? In a David vs Goliath situation where there is no realistic chance of stopping or defeating a more powerful aggressor, would it be considered acceptable to use non-conventional means and terrorism? Or is the weaker victim expected to play by the rules of warfare and accept its eventual defeat?
The parent comment is correct, if you can count the solutions, it is easy to find a solution. Assuming there is a solution, you set the first variable to either true or false and then count the solutions. If it is zero, you made the wrong choice and the first variable must be set to the opposite value. Repeat for the remaining variables until you have fixed all of them and found a solution. This takes n invocations of the counting algorithm and is probably what the parent comment means with O(n) even though this is not correct as it is O(n times whatever the counting algorithm runtime is) and not just O(n).
But the parent comment also missed my point. They have an algorithm for the counting problem which also provides a subexponential algorithm for the decision and search problem. But they could have refuted the exponential time hypothesis with a subexponential search or decisions algorithm which would not [easily] provide a subexponential counting algorithm.
And the claimed algorithm solves the counting problem, i.e. determining the number of different solutions, which in many cases is much harder than just determining whether a solution exists or finding one of the solutions.
The start of this discussion was that I multiplied wall-clock time and number of agents and someone argued that I should not have done this. It is of course reasonable to compare how much a human gets done in a certain amount of time vs what an agent gets done in that time. But if you start increasing the number of humans or agents, you have to take that into account. Running one agent for ten seconds is not the same as running a thousand agents for ten seconds - except for the completion time - but it is comparable to running one agent for ten thousand seconds.
But the difference is always there, hiring the first guy is more difficult by the same factor as running the first agent. The relevant comparisons are between one agent and a thousand agents (original setting) and between one guys and a thousand guys (analogy). In both cases the costs will be a thousand times higher and you can achieve a thousand times more in the same amount of time, so the correct measure is time times number guys or time times number agents. The difference between adding one guy and adding one agent is irrelevant for my point and that is also pretty obvious as that crosses the boundary between original setting and analogy.
You might want to make a separate point about the cost difference of getting more done by hiring more people or running more agents, but that is a different point.
Sure, I completely agree with that, but we totally went off-topic. The questions was whether the correct measure is wall-clock time or compute-time and for that the difference in difficulty to add another agent or add another employee is irrelevant. And to reiterate my point, compute-time is what delivers the results and also is what you pay for, so that is what counts. That you can squeeze that compute-time into a shorter amount of wall-time by utilizing more resources in parallel is also important but unrelated to the fact that compute-time is what delivers the results.
No, because more agents also means more resources and hence more costs. A single agent is not the same as a thousand agents which is not the same as a million agents. You are essentially saying what can one human do with X amount of time and an infinite amount of money.
You think I could not identify all the functions in some software if I poked at it with IDA pro for 15 years? Probably depends on what exactly we are talking about, is it calc.exe or an entire office suite? But I will give you that I would probably never complete the task, I would not be willing to spend 15 years doing this. Realistically I would probably be interested in some specific functionality and identify the functions involved and ignore the vast majority.
That makes no sense, because then I could also just give the task to a million people working on it in parallel and the speed-up would disappear. You have to compare all the resources used and not pick an arbitrary one like wall-clock time because resource can often be traded for each other.
Probably and the model had access to all those results. The question is whether 500 person-years of effort would have been enough to get there from the same point that the model started. And also not any 500 person-years, not 100 mathematicians independently working on it in parallel for 5 years, but 500 tightly cooperating person-years, 20 mathematicians in the same room for 25 years.
Okay, somewhat fair point, if you have no idea how to do X and learning to do X takes a non-trivial amount of time, then using a large language model could probably get you there a million times faster in some cases. But I would want to exclude those cases because they make the speed-up meaningless and instead assume that the user is reasonably competent to do the task.
You have to multiply them, otherwise you would also have to compare the output of a company with a single developer with the output of a company with a thousand developers, after all a company can hire an arbitrary number of developers. Running a thousand agents in parallel for one hour is the same as running a thousand agents one after another for a total of a thousand hours.
There are some things that are sped up by a very large factor, easily over 1000000x.
I will need an example for this, what can I achieve with a large language model in ten seconds that I can not do on my own in one and a half years [1]? Or one hour vs 568 years?
The unsolved math problems are one thing that came to my mind, after all no human could solve them. But Navier-Stokes took 10,000 agents for 88 hours, that are 500 years [1] for one human without any speed-up. Does not sound unreasonable to me that a human could have solved it if they could invest 500 years on it.
The other hundreds of math problems took on average 3 hours, with a speed-up of a million that would be 1,704 years [1] for one human.
[1] Assuming 220 working days per year, 8 hours per day.
I had never heard that and just had a look at the Wikipedia article and those claims seem to be primarily based on one biography. Other research based on his journals disputes the image portrayed in the Moore biography.
Do most people keep their old consoles or do they generally replace them with a newer one? And even if they keep them, do they actually use them or do they end up in the attic? And I guess you could always get one ten years after the release for little money.
Construct a sequence of basic transformations that turns the initial grid into the target grid. Each of the portals performs a certain transformation, the ring one, for example, rotates around the axis selected at the top by the amount selected around the ring.
If you placed those mines just in case, would wildlife not trigger one from time to time? How long until they would be mostly gone? And how long do they survive in the wild until they become unreliable or dangerous to handle? How hard would it be to replace or remove them if no longer needed?
Did I get this wrong, is this not meant for manual pointing? In which case corrected does not seem the right description, it will observe the sky rotation and add 15" to the pointing error every second, I have to manually correct that when things move out of the field of view.
- Accurate up to within 10 arcseconds (1/360 of a degree)
- Computes coordinates in less than a second
For comparison, the sky moves 15 arcseconds per second. So without a motorized mount to keep the telescope on target, the accuracy will be short-lived.
You are already in some trouble at step one - how do you figure out if something has any of those feelings? Just asking or observing the behavior does not seem good enough, one can easily write a program that prints »Yes, I am tired, I need some sleep.« and with more effort one could build a robot that behaves as if it was tired.
On the other hand I have a lot of sympathy for something I heard the first time from Daniel Dennett, that something like pain is just the sum of its effects. It occupies your mind and prevents you from thinking clearly, it makes you not move or touch the body part that hurts, it dulls other sense, and so on. If you removed all those effects, what would be left of pain? With that understanding you could probably probe if something is experiencing pain from the outside by looking for those effects.
PS the whole "a group of things [can't] share an internal world" spiel is weird and just plain wrong IMO. Humans could perfectly well share an internal world if the technical means were there.
I think you are dismissing this too quickly. Our internal world is part of us in a way a shared internal world would probably not be. A shared internal world would in certain respects not be too different from the external world, or a chat group, or a multi-player game, a space where several people interact. I have never thought about this, but it seems quite reasonable that the exclusivity of our internal worlds is a key feature. Why would I consider a shared space as integral part of my self?
Sure, that is why we have laws. My point is only that it is perfectly fine to be angry at those doing bad things. Being mad at the law makers is misdirected unless they maliciously or incompetently enabled the bad behavior. And ultimately one would maybe even have to look into the mirror, who put those people into power?