https://xkcd.com/242/

Still a lot of big problems like latency so I’m not too happy with the current design. It’s a LOT of state to replicate, and obviously things get problematic when an agent was working on a project on machine A but then ends up on machine B which doesn’t have that project directory around at all. So the agent needs to re-orient itself to figure out what happened. Still pretty fun to play with.

But let’s consider a hypothetical: what if an intuitive understanding of the true “boundaries” of mathematics (if such things exist) is beyond the capabilities of a human mind? If there truly is no way to simplify some proofs down from 200,000 line incomprehensible gibberish to something you could teach to a high schooler or undergraduate or even a PhD. Is the proof still worthless? Sure, at the moment, it might be. Finding such a proof and understanding the implications of it are different skills, the latter of which AI almost certainly does not possess at the moment. But there may come a time where the AI can view the bigger picture and make the leaps you described (say, an eka-Calculus from an eka-unit-circle). These leaps may be as unintelligible to us as the proof in OP is.

I guess the question is: assuming that we can’t make the proof beautiful enough to spark deeper human understanding, do we still want it if it sparks deeper AI understanding?

Personally I would hate to live in a universe where the boundaries of science are beyond intuitive human understanding, but I think it’s almost certainly the case. The idea that the rules are all within our grasp reeks of anthropocentrism to me. I would love for the universe to prove me wrong though. It’d be a pleasant, hilarious coincidence if they do fit within the boundaries of our understanding.

Unfortunately, whenever I try to apply this pattern 100%, I hit all kinds of walls: language isn't expressive enough to support what I want; the amount of wiring/glue to support it becomes a burden; the resulting code is spaghetti because the "declaration of intent" lives too far from "implementation of the intent"; "oops I invented my Nth leaky DSL"; and so on and so on. Part of the problem is certainly my own capabilities as a developer as well.

I can't help but fantasize about the platonic ideal of a "perfect" system where all that nasty evil I/O is banished to the Shadow Realm and I can frolic in the Fields of Idempotency and Reproduciblity -- one of these days I'll bite the bullet and try Haskell.

Nowadays I aim for 80% "perfection", and only in the areas where it matters. In addition, instead of effects I rely more on "reduce complexity as much as possible", which is (frustratingly) much harder to put into practice than "use X library/pattern to solve all problems". Though if I can model the system as a state machine and proptest it [2], that usually gets me where I want to be.

Though my soul feels like I just woke up from a dream where I was perfectly content, and now I'm back in the real world with all of its imperfections [3].

---

As for your specific project, it heavily reminds me of the Crux [4] model, which is itself inspired by Elm [5]. Also Flawless [6]. I wish you the best of luck with it.

[0]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/funct...

[1]: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/the-case-for-sans-io

[2]: https://sled.rs/simulation.html

[3]: https://xkcd.com/224/

[4]: https://github.com/redbadger/crux#architectural-overview

[5]: https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/

[6]: https://flawless.dev/

On the other hand if I try to talk to Facebook, all he says in response is "200 OK".

AIN'T THAT THE TRUTH.

My girlfriend is studying musicology and she has some physical disabilities that make it difficult for her to write things down sometimes. So I try to help her by writing some AI-powered TTS/OCR/etc. apps here and there. It becomes painfully obvious that music was never considered an important part of any AI training dataset, anywhere.

These days, I'm pleasantly surprised by how well Opus 4.8 understands/explains music theory (as you said). But ask him to transcribe/OCR/OMR some sheet music and he'll confidently give you the MusicXML/Lilypond equivalent of "2 + 2 = horse".

I really hope this ignored area will be swept up with the rest of the rising AI wave, but it's still criminally undervalued.

[0]: https://github.com/mnemosyne-proj/mnemosyne/issues/99

Perhaps the framing shouldn't be "haha slop" but rather why doesn't the AI write better quality software than we do? To which the answer is obvious IMO -- even emergent properties can't elevate AI intelligence too far above the training dataset. So how do we get to superintelligent (or at least "not-wreck-your-NVMe-endurance-telligent") AI, if we, as a whole, are not smart enough ourselves?

Judge not the slop-bot, lest ye be judged yourself, engineer.

*As of today, our solutions are able to solve all 49 problems in <1ms!*

I have obtained consent from all the top participants to post their solutions to a shared repo, for the community to review and learn from! *All solutions are now available at the linked GitHub repo!*

Our solutions have a total runtime of *988936ns*!

# Context/Caveats

- All submissions were run on the same hardware (Ryzen 5950X) to ensure consistency, with the same compiler flags and features available. This was on rustc nightly (updated throughout the course of the contest), and with CPU speed capped at 3400 MHz with boost clock disabled.

- AVX-512 was not available on the machine so none (?) of the solutions utilize that particular set of accelerated instructions, but there is plenty of other SIMD in use.

- All submissions were run against the same inputs to ensure consistency.

- Caching anything that has been fed with input was not allowed to prevent cheating and/or trivial solutions like `Map`.

- For the same reason, inputs were not directly available to the participants, and were not provided at compile-time.

- Participants were allowed to use compile-time tricks in their answers. Due to limitations in the benchmark bot, the runtime of these optimizations could not be measured. This was considered acceptable as the compiled binaries were expected to otherwise work correctly for arbitrary inputs. This means that participants are allowed to use look-up tables (LUTs) in their answers, but those LUTs are expected to work for arbitrary inputs, not just specific ones.

- I/O is trivial, and was thus not measured as part of the benchmark. That is, participants were provided with an `&str` or `&[u8]` input (their choice) and expected to provide an `impl Display` as part of their result. Therefore, input parsing was measured.

If you are interested, join us in #advent-of-code-2024 on the Discord server for further discussion :)

# Further Reading

If you would like a more in-depth explanation of some of the optimization techniques used, I highly recommend you check out this article by ameo [0] (one of our participants). It covers the process they used to optimize their solution for Day 9 Part 2, and how they got it to the top of our leaderboard. The article provides incredible information on the process of both high-level and micro optimization.

# Credits:

- Thank you to the members of the `Rust Programming Language Community` and `Serenity-rs` Discord servers and everyone else who participated in the challenge!

- Thank you to Eric Wastl for hosting AoC every year!

- Thank you to Noxim [1] for writing the original version of our benchmark bot [2].

- Extra special thank you to yuyuko [3], bend-n [4], and giooschi [5] for their help in maintaining and improving our benchmark bot.

[0]: https://cprimozic.net/blog/optimizing-advent-of-code-2024/

[1]: https://github.com/noxime

[2]: https://github.com/indiv0/ferris-elf

[3]: https://github.com/ultrabear

[4]: https://github.com/bend-n/

[5]: https://github.com/SkiFire13/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42568894

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

Now if only Intel would stop crippling AVX-512...

The video (if I recall correctly) goes a bit further, attacking patents/IP law as anti-creative.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc