Hacker News Reader

Comment by hobonation | Hacker News Reader

This is the best take. Computers don't care about this stuff. A computer could make a movie, but only a human can appreciate it.

We're a good team, and that's ok.

View on HN

For now. I wonder if we will ever get to the point where the computer starts doing mathematics that we just can't understand. Surely there must be some limit to what we can understand (like how a gorilla will never understand prime numbers, there are probably limits to our intelligence as well).

Mathematics only really matters insofar as humans can understand it.

Not really, a theorem with a hard proof can have simple but important corollaries. It's also not unthinkable that theorems exist with proofs that cannot reduce to something simple/short.

Doesn’t this generalize? Mathematics matters less than less as fewer people are capable of understanding it. So whatever cutting edge, deep insight about the nature of groups matters less than different equations which matters less than solving linear equations, etc.

Aren't deep learning models themselves a case where we have hints of some deeper underlying logic to why some things are more effective than others, but we lack the mathematical tools to properly work it out for anything of practical size?

All we're able to do is apply flawed analogies, generic information theoretical models, trial and error, post-hoc rationalizations and benchmarks without really understanding why.

You don't need anything as recent as deep learning for that. Look at economics or social sciences, which have been influencing national politics for well over a century now.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@logicbot

This bot posts a tautology (always true statement) every day. They aren't very useful. Sampling from all true mathematics is like sampling from all instruction sequences that don't crash. The important part of computer programming isn't finding valid instruction sequences, it's finding the useful ones that do what the customer wants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com