alt Hacker NewsI think that's too easy an analogy, though.
Calculators are deterministically correct given the right input. It does not require expert judgement on whether an answer they gave is reasonable or not.
As someone who uses LLMs all day for coding, and who regularly bumps against the boundaries of what they're capable of, that's very much not the case. The only reason I can use them effectively is because I know what good software looks like and when to drop down to more explicit instructions.
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Determinism just means you don't have to use statistics to approach the right answer. It's not some silver bullet that magically makes things understandable and it's not true that if it's missing from a system you can't possibly understand it.
> Calculators are deterministically correct given the right input. It does not require expert judgement on whether an answer they gave is reasonable or not.
That's not actually true. The HP-12C calculator is still the dominant calculator in business schools 45 years later precisely because it did take expert judgement to determine whether certain interest and amortization calculations were reasonable.
> Calculators are deterministically correct
Calculators are deterministic, but they are not necessarily correct. Consider 32-bit integer arithmetic:
Mathematically, they are identical. Computationally, the results are deterministic. On the other hand, the computer will produce different results. There are many other cases where the expected result is different from what a computer calculates.