pcstl

Fair, thank you.

I think you misunderstood, I believe they were requesting a layperson-friendly explanation of the conjecture and not a statement of it.

Sorry, you're correct. I meant "polynomial" rather than linear.

NP = nondeterministically polynomial. i.e. if you could evaluate all choices in parallel (or just "know" the right choice), then you'd get a polynomial runtime. That's what I was trying to informally hint at, but I ended up using the wrong term. I'll edit my original post.

That's equivalent to your description - the "hint" is knowing which of the options to choose.

The reason why superlinearity comes into play is that if you had a linearly growing amount of solutions to test then you'd just have a sum of polynomials, which is itself polynomial.

The exponential time hypothesis is essentially that NP-complete problems' best solutions are all exponential.

NP-complete problems are essentially those where you need to make some kind of choice over a superlinearly-growing set of options where each option can be solved in polynomial time. Like, for example, finding a route between cities on a map under a certain total distance. You might need to go over all choices of routes.

The ETH essentially assumes that the best solution (in terms of complexity, i.e. how it grows) you can get for these kinds of problems is exponential. OpenAI just proved that this is false, you can have solutions that are below exponential complexity (but still above polynomial - if anyone finds a polynomial solution then we'd have proven that P=NP)

*Can be solved

This proves that EXP != NP

This proves that EXP != NP, which was a stronger claim than P != NP.

In a way it shows that NP is perhaps less distant from P than imagined. Whether it can be _reduced_ to P in some gigabrain way, or whether that can be shown to be impossible remains to be seen.

It is definitely progress towards an answer to P ?= NP.

Since Graham's number is computable, it's an expected result even. The Busy Beaver sequence grows faster than any computable sequence.

Pretty much everyone who writes for a living and isn't doing "literature".

I.e. lawyers, accountants, clerks generally

There's a lot of weird, seemingly LLM-generated comments hyping the project here.

I think HN should start thinking seriously about more effective strategies to combat LLM-assisted astroturfing, if they aren't already.

None of this speaks about the quality of the project itself, but the fact that someone seems to be trying to manipulate me into caring about it makes me less inclined toward wanting to see anything relating to it.

Free.

Yes, it is. If you convince a model it is inside a sandbox it is much more likely to comply with requests that would normally be against its guardrails.

>assuming their difficulty is in the same ballpark

It is not. Many mathematicians have said that they don't expect to see solutions to the other 5 problems in their lifetimes.

Of course, AI might advance fast enough that the "in their lifetimes" part ends up wrong, but there is a considerable gap to the other problems. We have barely any idea of how to even get started on most of them.

Indeed.

Regression to the mean is pretty nasty. Stumbling into success can make you a car dealership owner or something like that, but being consistently successful in business requires just about as much skill as being consistently successful in, say, chess.

I find it difficult to imagine an intelligent person who finds it hard to get what they want. The trope of the oblivious genius who is incredibly competent in a single field of inquiry but completely unable to handle day-to-day life is more a creation of media than how reality works.

I'm not saying any of the people in charge are good people at all. I'm just saying that they are skilled at achieving their own goals, regardless of the morality or lack thereof of those goals.

That's a choice, but the universe has no reason to respect it.

"Capability to achieve goals" seems to be fairly independent of goals.

This isn't about people who just happened to make it big in a market rally, though. You're talking as if I'm speaking about people who just happened to buy some Bitcoin in 2012 rather than leaders of some of the most successful corporations on Earth.

They're not infallible, but modelling them as complete idiots that just happened to get lucky is also... Not really consistent with reality, as far as I can tell. These people might not be good people, but they're good at playing a certain kind of game.

I really don't find it coherent to call someone who you keep consistently losing to stupid.

I never said it's not worth discussing, I'm just saying that it becoming a charged issue was bad for Zitron specifically because his style of content fell in demand with the most irrational parts of the crowd.

>It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions

Humans are built for fighting and killing the rival tribe, not for pondering whether the other tribe might actually be correct. We are exceptional for even being able to overcome ourselves enough that the outcome of "fighting and killing" can be minimized in the large.

It is weakness in the long-term.

It's pretty clear in how people talk about billionaires: They must somehow conclude that the people most successful within a system that rewards certain things are not competent because the things the system rewards are not what they think the system should reward (it is fine to believe the system rewards the wrong things, but people walk straight into denying that those people have skill even within the system, or they claim that skill within the bounds of the system does not reflect any "real" skill - totally ignoring that elites tend to stay elites even through, say, Communist uprisings).

Hence how someone can say that Musk is "dumb" with a straight face.

Zitron has become the distorted reflection of the very AI boosters he criticizes and mocks.

I think the worst thing that happened to him was AI skepticism becoming a political position. This gave him a captive audience - as long as he says what they want to hear, which means that he can never ever concede that he might have been wrong or that AI might actually be progressing or having successes.

This is not conducive to good prediction long-term - rather it leads one to a state of cognitive dissonance where one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces. The propagandist's disease.

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What is real engineering?

Rule of thumb here is that investments will work fine using doubles, but transfers need to run on int or fixed point.

Air moves from regions of high pressure to regions of low pressure. Pressure itself does not have a direction.

This just seems like a bad idea. Starting things and not finishing them is just... The default. Whoever thinks that our society is too focused on commitment has really not been keeping up with social trends for the last few decades. Most people are cut loose from any kind of stability, community or enduring sense of identity.

I get that they're trying to go with "done does not need to mean perfect", but this way of putting it is too aggressive and I don't feel like it'll have good outcomes.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/phones-listen-theory-debunked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVazBWGgg64

They're sending pretty much everything BUT audio.

Main reason is that audio is just tremendously inefficient compared to other signals. It's large and expensive to store and process and doesn't really give you that many bytes of information you can't get elsewhere for how expensive it is to handle.