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by tomxor
1957 days ago
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> My perspective has been sobered quite a bit over the years - these things are rarely as simple as we might imagine they could be - but it remains heady stuff. I can see how it might give the right kind of person delusions of grandeur. Likewise, although i've settled on a slightly different perspective: that most systems have simple rules (if you go low enough), and that the complexity is in the emergent behavior... it's not that we cannot necessarily capture the former, but that our concept of computer is far too tiny to run those rules in enough depth or breadth. It hasn't lessened the interest for me though. The more I understand the less those childish ideas of "grandeure" make sense, to the point that my instinct is to be suspicious of ideas focused on exploitation rather than exploration, although they can be good seeds for exploration in the form of "what ifs". |
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I concur with this. The emergent behaviour is usually the only thing we can observe, so we model our systems according to it. The most beautiful (and usually the truest) models lie in the simplicity that causes the behaviour to emerge.
I wouldn't say our computers are too tiny, just that our brains aren't used to thinking in those terms, but we discover it by deep thinking and "deep iteration" in the topic and have to approach it from multiple sides.
Imagine yourself as a kid sitting at a chess-game, playing against Magnus Carlsen. You don't know who the guy is, you were just sitting at the sundae bar when the dude at the next table said "hey", pulled out a chess et and asked "Wanna play?". So you naively say ok, you got some time to kill while waiting for mom to pick you up.
And you start playing. You kinda know the basic rules and what the figures do. So you make a move, he makes a move, you make a move...a minute later, you eat his pawn. Ha! He did not see that coming. Soon, another one. You're killing this guy. 2 moves later, you're left with nothing but the king, running around the board. What the heck even happened?
Our minds are used to the "Eat figures = Win games" outlook, where simple steps lead to simple outcomes. While for Magnus, the figure you ate was a sacrifice that opened up a spot he will move his queen through in 3 moves. He knows the common patterns, permutations, defenses and can see moves ahead.
Our minds aren't used to thinking ahead and seeing what the sideffect of a sideffect does to the result of the sideeffect of the sideffect. Maybe once we were better at it, but we have more interruptions so less time and depth to it (in general).
That is why we can't figure out the simple rules at first - we can't see the trees from the forest.