Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

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In 1997, machines defeated a World Chess Champion for the first time, using brute-force "dumb search." Critics noted that while "dumb search" worked for chess, it might not necessarily be a general strategy applicable to other cognitive tasks.[a]

In 2016, machines defeated a World Go Champion for the first time, using a clever form of "dumb search" that leverages compute, DNNs, reinforcement learning (RL), and self-play. Critics noted that while this fancy form of "dumb search" worked for Go, it might not necessarily be a general strategy applicable to other cognitive tasks.[a]

In 2024, machines solved insanely hard math problems at the Silver Medal level in an International Math Olympiad for the first time, using a clever form of "dumb search" that leverages compute, DNNs, RL, and a formal language. Perhaps "dumb search" over cleverly pruned spaces isn't as dumb as the critics would like it to be?

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[a] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

The success in Go was very much not dumb search. Where dumb search had failed to achieve the level of even a very weak player, the neural net's "intuition" about good moves without any search was already very strong. Only the combination was superhuman, and that was anything but the dumb search that had been tried before.

Today's announcement is also not about proving Lean theorems by "dumb search". The success is about search + neural networks.

You're attacking critics for criticizing the solution that has failed, while confusing it for the solution that works to this day.

That's in fact precisely my point:

Clever forms of "dumb search" that leverage compute, DNNs, RL, self-play, and/or formal languages are not dumb at all.

I put the words "dumb search" in quotes precisely because I think critics who dismiss AI progress as such are missing the point.

We're not in disagreement :-)

>Clever forms of "dumb search" that leverage compute, DNNs, RL, self-play, and formal languages are not dumb at all

Right. My point is that you're attacking a position that no real critic holds. Of course we're in agreement then!

"Clever forms of dumb search are not dumb" feels a little like kicking down open doors. We were always going to agree.

> My point is that you're attacking a position that no real critic holds

I'm not so sure. I wrote my comment after seeing quite a few comments on other threads here that read like fancy versions of "this is just brute-force search over cleverly pruned trees." Search the other threads here, and you'll see what I mean.

I think that was the op's point.

A brute force search has perfect knowledge. Calling it "dumb" encourages bad analogies -- it's "dumb" because it doesn't require advanced reasoning. It's also "genius" because it always gets the right answer eventually. It's hugely expensive to run.

And you keep shifting the goalpost on what's called "dumb" here.

None of the above are brute force search.

You might have missed the point.

Tell us what the point was, I think a lot of us are missing it.

Moving the goal post of dumb search.

By its nature hard math problems do not have fast algorithmic solutions--you can only solve them by search or clever search. Mathematicians have heuristics on helping us decide intuitively what's going to work what can make progress. But in the end--there is only search

High efficiency "search" is necessary to reach AGI. For example, humans don't search millions of potentially answers to beat ARC Prize puzzles. Instead, humans use our core experience to shrink the search space "intuitively" and deterministically check only a handful of ideas. I think deep-learning guided search is an incredibly promising research direction.

By "dumb" I assume you meant brute-force. Search, as opposed to extrapolation, is what actually produces suprise or creative results, whether it happens in a person's head or on a computer. The issue is to produce the heuristics that can let one push back the combinatorial explosion.

Well written.

It kinda had to be this way, I think. There's a something from nothing problem. Douglas Adams brilliantly starts at this point.

We don't understand something from nothing. We don't even have the language to describe it. Concepts like "complexity" are frustratingly resistant to formalization.

"There is no free will." Has recently resurged as a philosophical position... like it did in response to Newton's mechanics.

Matter from void. Life from minerals. Consciousness from electrons. Free will from deterministic components. Smart reasoning & intelligent rationalisation from dumb search, computation, DNNs and such.

I don't think this debate was supposed to be ended by anything short of empirical demonstration.

Endnote: deep blue's victory over Gary was a bunch of preprogrammed bulls--t. Rematch!

If one of the lessons of LLMs was that much of "common sense" is covered in the written language corpus - that is, perhaps, basic human intelligence is covered by language.

Then, should we expect less with mathematics where written language is the normal way knowledge is propagated, and where formal proofs are wanted? An important distinction here is the coupling of search (not LLM for this one), a formal math language, and theorem proving. Math intelligence may not be merely the math written corpus, but adding the formal language and theorem proving sounds pretty powerful.

All this still lacks self-directed goals. An intention. For now that's taken care of by the human asking questions.

>that is, perhaps, basic human intelligence is covered by language.

It isn't. That's why LLMs are still terrible at basic reasoning tasks. The dataset doesn't contain the human intelligence, just the end results. Nobody is training their LLMs on brain scans.

From whence are you quoting the phrase "dumb search?"

So all forms of search are dumb in your view?

I think OP is arguing the opposite. In other words, critics of AI innovations call them “dumb search”. The goal post keeps moving.

Exactly. They are not dumb search!

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