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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

> The study would not have been possible without the use of artificial intelligence to weed through dozens of proteins in a class called prohormones.

I see we’re being fast and loose with the term “artificial intelligence”?

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Regexes were invented by Kleene in 1951, to describe McCulloch-Pitts neural nets. So, artificial intelligence!

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...

Jokes aside regexes being AI, lots of protein motifs can be elegantly described by simple regexes. And their classification performance is sometimes perfect.

See the Eukaryotic Linear Motif resource: http://elm.eu.org/elms.

AI is the new, “Algorithm”. It is an overly broad term that basically means, “Technology” to people who use it.

For non-technical people, terms like Machine Learning, Algorithm, Automation, AI, Neural Networks and 'Magical Powers' are synonymous.. Journalists, marketing teams, and executives choose whichever term generates the most hype and clicks.

I like to describe my job as a software engineer as "wizardry" to people. With the way LLMs are writing code, it's only getting closer to writing actual spells.

> "Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic."

— Thomas Szasz

"Like a magic crystal mirror, My computer lets me know Of the other world within it Where my body cannot go / The computer is a gateway To a world where magic rules Where the only law is logic Webs of words the only tools" https://mindstalk.net/filk/world.html

My understanding is that the original use of AI was to describe algorithms that solved complicated problems, but only sometimes, and usually through heuristics. As opposed to provably correct algorithms like Dijkstra's.

I think that's how we still use it.

unfortunately, if you do anything computational, when you need to explain it to a journalist/public audience/young person you want to hire/investor/trendchasing early user, you are incentivized to call it "AI".

It is a somewhat though provoking question for me where you LLM's fall in automata theory? Are they non-deterministic finite automatons which would make regex's a cousin? Or does it require pushdown automata levels of capability?

Could be that they relied on AI to generate the gnarly regex ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Any sufficiently advanced regex is indistinguishable from AI.

Even simple regex ones, since we don't know if they were created by a human or an AI.

With enough if statements, you could create a LLM.

I'm trying to think of a funny way to cite Clark's Law, but failing...

Regexes occasionally get called "black magic", and there is is an inverse of Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

I think you meant “any sufficiently commoditized magic is indistinguishable from technology”, or “any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.”

I am still waiting for an LLM trained to focus on effin' regexes and their variants like sed, somebody please do a page with ads for this and you will have a nice little side income and warm fuzzy feeling on top of it.

Natural language -> fully working one, I don't mean some email validators but way more complex stuff. Although, I've recently had a case which was too much even for regexes in any form or spec, then sort of grammar-based parser needed to be done from scratch.

I haven’t had the need for super complicated regexes, but ChatGPT and Claude both worked fine to generate a regex to extract markdown code blocks.

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