alt Hacker NewsFirstly, automobiles are really impressive.
Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses… first, and quite obviously they have massive amounts of horsepower, which is kind of like giving a team of horses… many more horses. But also cars have an absolutely massive fuel capacity. Petrol is such an efficient store of chemical energy compared to hay and cars can store gallons of it.
I think if you give my horse the ability of 300 horses and fed it pure gasoline, I would be kind of embarrassed if it wasn’t able to win a horse race.
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> Firstly, automobiles are really impressive. Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses
Yes. That’s why cars don’t compete in equestrian events and horses don’t go to F1 races.
This non-controversial surely? You want different events for humans, humans + computers, and just computers.
Notice that self driving cars have separate race events from both horses and human-driven cars.
Power is one thing, efficiency is another.
Humans are more efficient watt for watt than any AI ever invented.
Now if you were to limit AIs to 400 watts we could probably thinks it's fair.
I was struck how the argument is also isomorphic to how we talked about computers and chess. We're at the stage where we are arguing the computer isn't _really_ understanding chess, though. It's just doing huge amounts of dumb computation with huge amounts of opening book and end tables and no real understanding, strategy or sense of whats going on.
Even though all the criticism were, in a sense, valid, in the end none of it amounted to a serious challenge to getting good at the task at hand.
I don’t think you’ll find many race tracks that permit horses and cars to compete together.
(I did enjoy the sarcasm, though!)
Snark aside, I would expect a car partaking in a horse race to beat all of the horses. Not because it's a better horse, but because it's something else altogether.
Ergo, it's impressive with nuance. As the other commenter said.
Your analogy is flawed.
Are the humans allowed to bring their laptops and use the internet? Or a downloaded copy?
Comparing power with reasoning does not make any sense at all.
Humans have surpassed their own strength since the invention of the lever thousands of years ago. Since then, it has been a matter of finding power sources millions of times greater such as nuclear energy
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The massive amounts of compute power is not the major issue. The major issue is unlimited amount of reference material.
If a human can look up similar previous problems just as the "AI" can, it is a huge advantage.
Syzygy tables in chess engines are a similar issue. They allow perfect play, and there is no reason why a computer gets them and a human does not (if you compare humans against chess engines). Humans have always worked with reference material for serious work.
Yeah man, and it would be wild to publish an article titled "Ford Mustang and Honda Civic win gold in the 100 meter dash at the Olympics" if what happened was the companies drove their cars 100 meters and tweeted that they did it faster than the Olympians had run.
Actually that's too generous, because the humans are given a time limit in ICPC, and there's no clear mapping to say how the LLM's compute should be limited to make a comparison.
It IS an interesting result to see how models can do on these tests - and it's also a garbage headline.