alt Hacker NewsCalculus is definitely the harder task, considering it took a species developing the cognitive capacity for symbolic reasoning for it to show up, whereas any animal can figure out how to position its limbs. Yeah, we figured out how to make CAS programs before inverse kinematics software, but that's because computers were made to solve numerical problems, not to replace the cerebella of chordates.
> Calculus is definitely the harder task,
You’re only evaluating “harder” or “easier” based on the perspective of somebody who has a mammalian brain with millions of years of selective pressure to make it suitable for solving inverse kinematics problems.
The point here is that when we start constructing agents or tools with different architectures to ourselves, it makes sense to reevaluate notions of whether something is ‘hard’ or ‘easy’. LLMs are bad at counting not because counting is hard, but because their architecture makes it hard.