I agree with both of you, but scaling isn't feasible with this paradigm. You could need continent-sized hardware to approximate general intelligence with the current paradigm.
> You could need continent-sized hardware to approximate general intelligence with the current paradigm.
I doubt it, if by "current paradigm" you mean the hardware and general execution model, eg. matrix math. Model improvements from progress in algorithms have been outpacing performance improvements from hardware progress for decades. Even if hardware development stopped today, models will continue improving exponentially.
No, for me 30-50. The objective is to be socially apt.
In this dose range I can feel a little drunk but still have a conversation and be less impaired intellectually than with alcohol.
But it will last longer and, more importantly, I will not be able to sleep for hours which is the biggest blocker at using it at all for those situations.
> We should have solved chess already.
> We should be aiming to solve chess, but we are not even trying.
We are trying and we should not expect to solve it because the search space is massive. There are more legal games of chess than atoms in the universe.
True, but we can at the very least teach a computer to prune what are effectively unreachable positions or openings that won't happen at a basic level let alone high level or GM level play.
For example, I don't think I've ever seen or will ever see:
1. a3 a6
2. h3 h6
The computer should be given the logic in which to solve chess by telling it right off the bat to not search through certain lines or openings because they are effectively useless.
You think no one has done that? Aside from explicitly encoding book lines, NN weights developed over millions of games steer chess engines away from useless lines.
But if you don't explore a line, even if you believe it's effectively useless, then you haven't solved chess.
P.S.
> I don't think I've ever seen or will ever see: 1. a3 a6 2. h3 h6
I have. Children and other beginners often do play like this. And even at GM levels we've seen nonsense like the Bongcloud and, marginally less nonsensically, the Cow opening.
>But if you don't explore a line, even if you believe it's effectively useless, then you haven't solved chess.
That's actually a good point because ideas that modern GMs found to be useless (in particular, locking a wing down via aggressive early wing play) have actually found a new home in AlphaZero's play.
What might be completely dumb from an early move (say, aggressively pushing the F pawn from the start) might provide to be an incredible opening, but humans are too stupid to be able to execute it perfectly.
This is the precisely the point I am trying to make :
A candidate solution function can take a very small finite space : much smaller than the number of gamestates.
And we can invalidate a candidate solution by finding a single counter example.
Current chess engine can't be invalidated quickly : they are not trying to solve chess. They are not falsifiable. They are not attempting to precisely define the frontier which is what I think where remaining efforts should be made.
We are just trying to encode the frontier like we would with a mandelbrot fractal.
Proving that a solution is valid is harder than finding a solution. Here I am suggesting we find the solution first.
Proving can also be done without exploring all legal chess positions. For example you can use branch and bound to cull vast amount of state space once you have your function. You just have to partition the state space and prove on each partition that the function is constant, for example when one side has 8 queen and the other has only a king with freedom of movement the position is winnable and you don't have to check every gamestate.
I am stating that there is a good chance that by searching for a function we will stumble upon one which has no counter example, because precisely the complexity of chess is not infinite (unproven conjecture (no-turing completeness of adversarial chess) ). We should be looking for it.
Who is currently trying? You make it sound like people think it is impossible and hence would not try.
>There are more legal games of chess than atoms in the universe.
This only matters if you are doing a pure brute force. Also comparing exponential numbers to a count is an unfair comparison where exponents easily win.
Not only China but let us assume iPhones are made in China only.
China gets a modest share of the profits, because Apple pockets the rest. Reinvesting a fraction in US and stashing most of the profits in banks across the world that use this money as leverage to buy US bonds, among other things.
The physical phone is a "good" that is exported from china. But the majority of the value for an iPhone is in the "services" rendered to that phone, which may be sold/exported from the US but can likely be shifted to other countries in order to avoided taxation/tariffs.
The upper class vacuuming up all profit, greatly exacerbating inequality, is a far bigger deal than the inflationary impact of immigration. Your analysis is poor.
I suppose if we are to digress to the land of "shoulds", Israel should not have decided to delete tens of thousands of Gazan children in the interim.
Even if we grant that Israel offered this ceasefire deal in good faith in May, a bungled deal by Qatar/Egypt/Hamas does nothing to justify the ethnic cleansing they conducted in 2024.
I couldn't possibly have given less of a fuck whether Hassan Nasrallah drew another breath; the point is that Hamas and all the regional forces backing it were drastically compromised and/or reduced to their combustion products in the months that followed their May 27 rejection, and they are in much worse shape today. They should have taken the deal in May.
The timing of their acceptance of a 42-day ceasefire - whether now or eight months prior - bears little significance for the long-term outlook of Hamas or the civilian death toll in Gaza. Strange analysis to hang your hat on, Thomas.
>We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tens of thousands of child deaths
We have absolutely tons of credible evidence in fact. In September, The Gaza health ministry published names and details of 34,344 identified dead ( the remaining 7,613 that made the official death toll were unidentified). Of these 11,355 are children below the age of 18.
:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/17/gaza-publishes...
Gaza Health Ministry figures have been generally found to be reliable by international agencies, western governments and journalists from years of experience in previous conflicts and corroborate their own independent investigations and reports. Israel will also have full records of most of these people given that they issue ID cards to Gaza.
I haven't mentioned the thousands of missing buried under rubble or dismembered into multiple pieces or eaten by stray dogs. Or deaths due to starvation and disease (due to Israeli blockade of water and food) and excesss deaths due to denial of access to medical care (again due to the blockade of medicines and due to Israel's deliberate targeting of every hospital in Gaza).
I have yet to read a credible report that doesn't also mention the very high proportion of children (and women and elderly) in the casualty figures.
> We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tends of thousands of child deaths.
Unfortunately we have.
> Don’t start stupid wars
This was indeed an insanely stupid move from Hamas.
> Hezbollah (and Iran) has been rational
Idk if I'd call that rational: they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it. Only do discover that appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers.
> they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it
Fear can be rational. Rational fear measures costs and benefits. It's balanced by grimmer trigger strategies [1], e.g. disproportionate retaliation.
> appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers
Correct. Israel isn't a superpower.
(Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win. If there is no possible world in which you win, the correct move is to drop the organised response to preserve resources and go guerilla. Part of the reason for maintaining peacetime readiness is so that you have the option of grim triggering.)
On the middle east scene, the balance of power is so lopsided in favor of Israel that I stand with this qualifier even though I use it in a way that isn't the most common way (as a “global superpower”, which Israel isn't)
> Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win
Winning can take many shape, you don't have to be able to eradicate an opponent to be better off than if you tried to appease him and lost everything. For instance
even if Ukraine were forced to accept a peace deal that involve losing all of the occupied territories, they would be far better off than if Zelensky caved before the invasion.
There's no doubt that the outcome for Nasrallah wouldn't have been worse had he declare open war on Israel directly after Oct 7th. The problem is that he though he had a lot to lose, when instead given Israel's long term plan he could only have improved his position.
> the balance of power is so lopsided in favor of Israel that I stand with this qualifier even though I use it in a way that isn't the most common way
You use it in a way that renders it meaningless. If Israel is a superpower so is Iran, and at that point we’re talking about one nuclear-ambitious superpower encircling a nuclear superpower, a situation that historically justified a whole lot more than bombing buildings.
> he though he had a lot to lose
He was wrong and got killed. Same as Sinwar. The difference is Hezbollah learned quickly; Hamas took longer.
There's an order of magnitude between those two in terms of military power. Iran has little ability to even hit a strategically important target in Israel, while Israel has the capability to destroy anything up in Iran. Comparing those two is as misleading as comparing the Iraqi military to the US right before the gulf war.
> He was wrong and got killed. Same as Sinwar.
The comparison is very poor: not only Nasrallah is dead, but his life's entire project has been defeated: Hezbollah has lost its military power and also its political power in Lebanon, the blow it took was crushing. On the other hand, Hamas still controls Gaza and will replenish its forces easily because they have full support from the population at this point (some sources even suggest that Hamas has gained more militants than it has lost in the war already, and even if it's not yet the case, there's no doubt it will in medium terms at least).
Israel has been unable to convert its tactical victory into a strategic one against Hamas, whereas the defeat of Hezbollah is a strategic one (Jolani put the nail in the coffin by taking over Syria).
11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
> that's not war, thats war crimes
It’s both. And unfortunately, it’s the variety of war crime that’s essentially normalised to modern urban warfare. (Especially if one side hides its assets among civilians.)
The only war crimes we seem to hold others to account on are WMD ones, and even then it seems there’s a pass for chemical weapons.
I hate this. But I’m contextualising the figure. Anyone going to war in the Levant racks up those numbers. Including if the Palestinians got UN approval to conquer Israel. The difference between these unfortunately common war crimes and “regular” war is the difference between tens of thousands and 11,000.
> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
The 11,000 figure the other poster cited is the approximate number of children that have been killed whose death was been identified and linked with a name by the Gaza Health Ministry in September. GHM was part of a barely functional government before 10/7 and now is part of a barely functional government in a war zone. The actual figure is significantly higher, but with a wide confidence interval: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.ht...
Tens of thousands is not an understatement. Numbers are not meaningless, indeed.
> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
1) you're splitting semantic hairs that no one but you actually cares about. No one who is still on the fence is going to see your comment and think "hmm I guess I still don't know". If you'll excuse the death of 11,000 children you'll excuse the death of any amount of children.
2) this conflict has been going on for over a year but that quote only reflects a years worth of data so the real number will be higher than the one I supplied.
3) I take it you don't know what conservative means in this context? Let me break it down for you another way then.
The lancet's conservative estimates up to 186,000 deaths will be attributable to the IOF's handling of Gaza. Given 43% of the population of Palestine was children before Oct 7th that means we can expect about 80,000 children will have died as a results of Israel's actions even if the ceasefire holds.
The dynamics of how they unfold is that I am dropping links from well respected (and frequently Jewish Israeli) institutions and getting bombarded by whataboutisim, misinformation and semantic arguments that interest no one but the commenter.
The dynamics is that one side cares about history and the truth and the other side is a whitewashing campaign for genocide.
"Hamas surely deserves some credit for the deaths" This is literally equivalent to saying the Jews deserved [some credit for causing] the holocaust.
There are people in this thread breaking down the history from literally 139 BC to the current day (although hardly anything before 1920 is actually relevant to the current conflict).
To handwave all the complexity away when it's presented to you in a form that would take only a few hours to fully digest and say "both sides"... it's definitely a choice.
Is Hamas technically at fault for giving Israel an excuse for committing genocide?
I guess, if you think such a thing is even possible.
I'm sure these are beliefs you hold in good faith that you've worked hard to inform yourself about but this comment is a case in point for why I think these threads are cursed. You're convinced there's no discussion to have at all. That's a reasonable perspective to have! But then: what are we doing here?
> wouldn't have happened no matter what Hamas wanted back then
Very difficult to predict. Israel unilaterally rejecting a ceasefire plays very differently in the Congress and Tehran than both sides telling the other to fuck off.
The US administration under Bidden has not shown a single sign they were willing to put pressure on Netanyahu, and regarding Iran Israel has full escalation dominance over them and it's not like they care what the Iranian think of them.
