alt Hacker NewsBut that's from, like, floating point errors, right? If you used higher precision that wouldn't happen, it's just because we're cheap in how we do rounding.
I can see how you'd nitpick this, but to me this is a deterministic algorithm that just happens to be running on nondeterministic hardware.
I mean, currently we'd have some difficultly proving our hardware isn't deterministic, just that we can't actually test it.
But, I think you're tricking yourself on determinism. You'll say something like "I know if I ask an LLM what 1+1 is, it will answer 2", but the thing is, you don't. You have to run the LLM first to figure out it's output. And when you send in just a few bits of text, it's outputs are going to be rather limited.
But this all breaks when it hits the real world. Inputs are unpredictable. Hence while LLM outputs, like humans, are probabilistic, you can't figure out what it's going to be until you ask. And in any high complexity data gathering environment you're going have a difficult time ensuring your entire systems conditions are the same.
System consistency is very hard, once you start running thousands of processors in an agentic loop small errors accrue and timing starts differing and the system will take non-deterministic paths.