logoalt Hacker News

octoberfranklin • today at 2:25 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

There are several of these "exponent used to be 1.0, we reduced it to 0.9999999" results in the "catalog".

There are also a bunch of other stinkers, like building a Turing machine out of Navier-Stokes fluids -- except that it only works if you can encode literally infinite amounts of data in the relative positions of two particles. I.e. assuming physics is based on set-theoretic real numbers, something we've known is wildly false for over a century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox

Just like vuln reporting, the AI industry has put zero effort into triage here, and the models are really good at making their findings sound more important than they really are.

The cynic in me suspects this is a smokescreen for the Navier-Stokes tokenstream plagarism fiasco.


Replies

WhitneyLand • today at 2:35 AM

It’s not a stinker.

It’s not meant to be an engineering improvement, it’s an important theoretical result because it casts doubt on things that were previously thought to be impossible.

vessenes • today at 4:57 AM

Wait is that the consensus interpretation of banach-tarski for physicists? That reality must not encode reals? I’m surprised by this.