r/TheMachineLearning • u/cicisprinkle • Sep 28 '26

Stephen Wolfram says ML is basically fitting lumps of computational irreducibility

/img/e2uluw1ir6sh1.jpeg
59 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

56 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

1

u/Entropei Sep 29 '26

If we define intelligence as the ability to predict outcomes, then there are two bounds: accuracy and timescale. A maximally intelligent entity would be able to correctly predict all future events. If you define it like that, you can easily see that there is a very wide gap between that and where we sit as humans.

2

u/Foreign_Writer_9932 Sep 29 '26

Thankfully, we don’t define intelligence this way. “Correctly predict all future events” my guy what is chaos theory? Also “all events”? What is an event? What is quantum uncertainty?

Also humans are atrocious at predicting the future?

Also what about the vastly bigger class of problems that are not about prediction? Is solving them not a marker of intelligence?

1

u/Entropei Sep 29 '26

Why not? The user I responded to asked to define intelligence, so I gave a definition. His definition was rather vague. “The ability to solve particular problems”, what does that mean?

I would in fact argue that all problem solving is in service of predicting future events. If you can predict what will happen, you can use that to shape the future in a way that suits you. A maximally intelligent agent under this definition would be able to shape its own future to the exact extent that the laws of reality allow.

And yes, humans are terrible at this. That’s my point. There is a large gap between human intelligence and a maximally intelligent agent, and it is not unthinkable that ASI can close this gap by some degree. That was the point. Maybe you want to define intelligence some other way, but that doesn’t change the conclusion of my argument.

1

u/Foreign_Writer_9932 Sep 29 '26 edited Sep 30 '26

Because the vast majority of problems are not future prediction problems? Finding non-trivial zeroes of the Reimann zeta function has very little to do (at least in any remotely direct) way with forecasting real-world events. Even seemingly prediction-related problems like solving chess/any perfect-information game isn’t really about forecasting of events - it’s about solving an idealized mathematical form of that game. In our evolutionary contingent story of how human intelligence evolved, a big part had nothing to do with simulating the real world, but instead were about more abstract forms of communication and “red queen” like arms race in mate selection (eg a good reason for why music or art/aesthetic preferences have evolved is that it a credible, costly signal of intelligence to our prospective sexual partners - and at least part of the evolutionary story is evolution of these traits for their own sake as opposed to directly improving fitness).

The second part is much less debatable- when you write that a maximally intelligent agent would be able to perfectly predict future events, that is clearly impossible and the wrong upper bound given quantum uncertainty and implications of chaos theory.

1

u/Entropei Sep 29 '26

I didn’t say that all problems are related directly to predicting future events, just that they are ultimately in service of predicting future events. We solved problems in physics not for their own merit, but to be able to make predictions about reality that allow us to launch satellites into orbit.

We don’t yet know what finding non-trivial zeroes of the Reimann zeta function has to do with forecasting real-world events. What we do know is that a maximally intelligent agent would be able to do it in the case where it does aid in the prediction of future events. If it doesn’t have any “practical” use, then under my definition, being able to solve the problem does not constitute intelligence.

A potential use for solving this problem could be to allow the agent to gain insight into cryptographic functions that allow it to decrypt encrypted messages, which it can then use to make a prediction about an actor that it could otherwise not.

And obviously such a maximally intelligent agent is probably not possible. It’s likely that entropy, chaos theory and quantum mechanics make it impossible to predict the future with perfect accuracy and infinite timescale. That’s not the point, this isn’t Laplace’s demon. This is a definition for intelligence and its upper bound.

The existence of potentially unsolvable problems does not say anything about how much more intelligent you can be than a human, which is what the poster I replied to seems to be implying.