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Comment by wsdookadr | Hacker News Reader

What's surprising is that anyone would've expected an AI to come up with a brand-new algorithm with better complexity than pre-exsiting human-made solutions. How could it possibly come up with something better when it doesn't even understand how the original authors of qsort/mergesort/etc came up with their own..

Sure, it's great PR for the company, but.. the results just aren't there.

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How could AlphaZero possibly play better chess than humans when it doesn’t even understand the history of chess theory?

RL doesn’t stop at human levels

Because the entire history of chess theory is really a set of heuristics to optimize a tree search.

So is computer science.

You make it sound so simple. Why don't we let an AI try to come up with all of CS on its own? I doubt it would/could.

Even if AlphaZero does play better chess, there's absolutely zero it can do in terms of explaining why it played that way. AlphaZero is zero in terms of explainability. Humans have to explain to themselves and to others what they do, this is key in understanding what's happening, in communicating what's happening, in human decision-making, in deciding between what works and what doesn't and how well or how bad it works.

Returning back to the original DeepMind press release, it's misinforming the public about the alleged progress, in fact no fundamental progress was made, DeepMind did not come up with an entirely new sorting algorithm, the improvement was marginal at best.

I maintain my opinion that Alphadev does not understand any of the existing sorting algorithms at all.

Even if AI comes up with a marginal improvement to something, it's incapable of explaining what it has done. Humans (unless they're a politician or a dictator) always have to explain their decisions, how they got there, they have to argue their decisions and their thought-process.

It cannot explain because (1) it is not necessary to become good and (2) it wasn't explicitly trained to explain.

But it's reasonable to imagine a later model trained to explain things. The issue is that some positions might not be explainable, as they require branching too much and a lot of edge cases, so the explanation is not understandable by the human.

It's unreasonable to give up on explanations and deem something "not understandable" when we've been doing this thing for 3000+ years called mathematics, where it's exactly explainability that we seek and the removal of doubt. The only other entities that we know of who can't communicate or explain what they're doing are animals.

Can you explain your tastes? Why you prefer an apple to an orange for instance? Not really.

Can you explain how you had the intuition for a certain idea ? No you can explain why it works but not how the intuition came.

This isn't a question of taste. The topic can't be trivialized to a choice between apples and oranges. I actually reject your entire last message.

My point is that most of our actions are intuitive and cannot be explained. maybe this is similar to system 1 vs system 2.

It's fine if you want to refer to Kahneman's classification [1] of instinctual and thorough thinking. Explainability is a separate topic. Also when the amount of energy and compute used are as high as they are.. the results, the return on investment really isn't that high. Hopefully there are better days ahead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

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