Human problem solving

What Hacker News says

1. bborSep 2024
   Wow, just had to comment because this one is hilarious. Everyone else has the typical "I built my own accounting CLI" or "I'm thinking about maybe publishing my devtool", and you're over here casually describing your building. I just have to say: well done, that sounds like quite the life! The world will no doubt appreciate your toil one day, even if you feel stressed in the short term. IDK why, but your comment makes me want to share one of my favorite quotes:

      Only with time will the period of my real influence begin and I trust that it will be a long one, for I am firmly convinced of Seneca's promise: "Although envy imposed silence on all who lived with you, those men will come who will judge without ill-will and without favour." 
   

   - Schopenhauer's Doctoral Dissertation, The Fourfold Root

   I'd throw my hat in the ring as a philosophy-minded SWE who's coming up on the end of my runway while writing my book on unifying symbolic+connectionist AI (going for ~1y now), but your choice of currency tells me you probably don't have a need for any of us yanks. Instead, I'll send you my very strongest best wishes from across the ocean! And while I'm at it, I'll endorse my absolute favorite paper ever written on search, in case it sparks some ideas: Simon & Newell's Human Problem Solving (1970) https://github.com/vlall/Ai-Papers/blob/master/1971_Human%20... . If you're not already teaching it, ofc ;)

   This quote in particular pops into my head at least once a day:

     The problem solver's search for a solution is an odyssey through the problem space, from one knowledge state to another, until his current knowledge state includes the problem solution.

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2. bborFeb 2025
   Despite what Sam Altman (a high-school graduate) might want to be true, human cognition is not just a massive pile of intuition; there are critical deliberative and intentional aspects to cognition, which is something we've seen come to the fore with the hubbub around "reasoning" in LLMs. Any AGI design will necessarily take these facts into account--hardcoded or no--and will absolutely be capable of forming plans and executing them over time, as Simon & Newell described the best back in '71:

     The problem solver’s search for a solution is an odyssey through the problem space, from one knowledge state to another, until… [they] know the answer.
   

   With this in mind, I really don't see any basis to attack the intelligence explosion hypothesis. I linked a Yudkowsky paper above examining how empirically feasible it might be, which is absolutely an unsolved question at some level. But the utility of the effort itself is just downright obvious, even if we didn't have reams of internet discussions like this one to nudge any nascent agent in that direction.

   [1] Simon & Newell, 1971: Human Problem Solving https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1971-24266-001

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3. mafuyDec 2024
   It is commonly misunderstood what STM is capable of. It is nowadays known that STM is crap on many levels and can only hold around around 3 items, and unreliably at that. Certainly not 7 as was proposed earlier.

   Anything beyond that goes into LTM. It takes around 5 seconds to put something into LTM. If the test talked about here has more than 3 things to remember, LTM must be in use and will be a limiting factor.

   Any differences between people at that point likely refer to their chunking capabilities, i.e. if they can reduce complex patterns to a single entity to remember (each of which takes ~5 seconds).

   Source: Human Problem Solving by Newell/Simon.

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4. bborFeb 2024
   Any thoughts for a Philosophy section? i.e. meta-CS. I'm thinking about stuff like this, though I guess it would better as blog posts or second-hand critiques:

   - Chomsky 1956, _Three models for the description of language_ https://chomsky.info/wp-content/uploads/195609-.pdf

   - Naur 1985, _Programming as theory building_ https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

   - Simon & Newell 1970, _Human Problem Solving_ https://iiif.library.cmu.edu/file/Newell_box00018_fld01306_d...

   etc. Maybe too broad a topic? Basically this list feels like it's lacking answers to some fundamental "why is it like this" questions, if that makes sense.

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