this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
135 points (94.1% liked)

Technology

60021 readers
3392 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
135
Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem (www.technologyreview.com)
submitted 1 year ago by yesman to c/technology
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The researchers started by sketching out the problem they wanted to solve in Python, a popular programming language. But they left out the lines in the program that would specify how to solve it. That is where FunSearch comes in. It gets Codey to fill in the blanks—in effect, to suggest code that will solve the problem.

A second algorithm then checks and scores what Codey comes up with. The best suggestions—even if not yet correct—are saved and given back to Codey, which tries to complete the program again. “Many will be nonsensical, some will be sensible, and a few will be truly inspired,” says Kohli. “You take those truly inspired ones and you say, ‘Okay, take these ones and repeat.’”

After a couple of million suggestions and a few dozen repetitions of the overall process—which took a few days—FunSearch was able to come up with code that produced a correct and previously unknown solution to the cap set problem, which involves finding the largest size of a certain type of set. Imagine plotting dots on graph paper. The cap set problem is like trying to figure out how many dots you can put down without three of them ever forming a straight line.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We have solved the unsolvable problem.

Should probably rename it then.

[–] AbidanYre 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Lots of problems are unsolvable until they're solved.

[–] victorz 6 points 1 year ago

Kind of abusing the word there a bit though eh. Maybe call them something like "really feggin hard problems" instead.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This is mostly incorrect. There are provably unsolvable problems and unsolved problems. Many times someone will mislabel the latter as the former; that doesn’t make it actually provably unsolvable. Often we suspect unsolved problems might be unsolvable but do not go to the extreme of claiming it until it’s proved impossible to solve.