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AI is great at reducing the search space and using human-like reasoning (in a brute-force way) to carry out the brute-force search. I'm not surprised by this re
by William_BB 2mo ago
AI is great at reducing the search space and using human-like reasoning (in a brute-force way) to carry out the brute-force search. I'm not surprised by this result. This is exactly what AI should excel at, with human guidance.
- igravious 2mo ago"using human-like reasoning (in a brute-force way)" that's self-contradictory -- what brute force means is doing an exhaustive search of a search space (brute forcing it) using human-like(?) reasoning means cutting down the search space by having some sort of insight or intuition which allows you to prune branches from the entire tree
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo agoLLMs don't search trees. They generate plausible proofs and a human has to check it's true. Repeat until.
- astrange 2mo agoAgents can generate formal proofs that are checked with an oracle like Lean and can run in a loop.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo agoWhat are the search algorithms then? DFS, BFS, A*, etc, can you name them?
- tptacek 2mo agoWhy are you asking them which basic computer science graph traversal algorithms a frontier model used?
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo agoOP: >> using human-like(?) reasoning means cutting down the search space by having some sort of insight or intuition which allows you to prune branches from the entire tree So according to the OP there's a search of a tree and it also uses pruning btw, so I want to know what search they mean. Why are you asking?
- tptacek 2mo agoBecause your question doesn't make sense; this isn't how implicit search works.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo ago"Implicit search" with pruning?
- tptacek 2mo agoI don't understand why you're scare quoting "implicit search".
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo agoIt's a direct quotation from your comment, not a "scare quote". How does "implicit search" do pruning? Can you explain? Edit: Turns out "implicit search" is actually a thing in the literature, albeit introduced in a single paper I could find that claims Diffusion Modelling does it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19805 https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19805 I don't think anyone has picked that term up. One more for the scrapheap then, oh well, next paper. No mention of pruning though. So what did you, or the other guys mean?
- wmorgan 2mo agoWhy not? Lasker said, “when you see a good move, look for a better one.” That was tree pruning advice for an implicit search.
- tptacek 2mo agoThat's not what happened here. This isn't a proof; it's a counterexample. The model was perfectly capable of verifying its correctness. You could have verified it by hand if you wanted; the verification is trivial. Finding it was the hard part.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo ago>> The model was perfectly capable of verifying its correctness. It's an LLM. It can't do that.
- tptacek 2mo agoAre you doing the "LLMs don't know how many R's are in 'Raspberry'" thing here? A bunch of people on the original thread about the Conjecture were like "we need to wait and see if real mathematicians verify this proof it's probably just LLM psychosis", because they don't understand that the counterexample is a trivial calculation. Checking it isn't hard; any AP calc student can do it quickly. It's finding the counterexample that's the challenge. It's as if someone presented a SHA-2 collision, which anyone could just feed to `openssl sha256` to see, and then naysayers were like "we need to wait for independent verification because the LLM can't know if that collision was real".
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo ago>> Are you doing the "LLMs don't know how many R's are in 'Raspberry'" thing here? I don't know. Are you doing the thing were you're arguing against something you don't like that the other person never said?
- tptacek 2mo agoThe model is very capable of checking this counterexample, was my point.