[AndrewKemendo]

There’s no other way to do it for this type of a brain. I know because I have the same type of brain.

I spend 90% of my time formulating descriptions of the problem and the desired end state

Hallucinating futures where the state of the world is in a state that I either wanted to be or that somebody’s asking me to build

Once you know your final end state, then you need to evaluate the current state of the things that need to change in order to transition to the final state

Once you have your S’ and S respectively then the rest of the time is choosing between hallucinations based on sub-component likelihood of being able to move from S to S’ within the time window

So the process is to basically trying to derive the transition function and sequencing of creating systems and components that are required, to successfully transition from state S to state S'

So the more granular and precise you can define the systems at S and S' then the easier it is to discover the likelihood pathway for transitional variables and also discover gaps, where systems don't exist, that would be required for S'

Said another way: treat everything - both existing and potential futures- as though they are or within an existing state machine that can be modeled. Your task is to understand the markov process that would result in such a state and then implement the things required to realize it.

The religious call this "Prayer"

Others call it "Manifesting"

[biggestbrain1]

This is perhaps the most verbose and ridiculous way of saying "I think about how to solve the problem". It feels like a parody with the prompt of: how a person who scored 170 on an online IQ test would describe how their brain works.

[Twisol]

It would be kinder to assume that "I think about how to solve the problem" doesn't capture the nuances of actually doing that thinking to the satisfaction of the commenter, and this is their attempt to articulate it to match their experience. The process of "understand the starting point, the desired end point, and identify the path between them" closely matches the way I approach problems. If you don't feel inclined to meet someone where they're at, you can say so without condescension.

[biggestbrain1]

"understand the starting point, the desired end point, and identify the path between them" That is the definition of problem-solving. If there was any nuance in the original comment, we both failed to find it.

[deanCommie]

Twisol's point that you failed to find is that you could choose to give AndrewKemendo the benefit of the doubt.

Clearly there is something novel about the way Dijistra thought and worked. Most of us don't do things that way - formulate our thinking, then work towards one perfect first draft.

AndrewKemendo saw that and said "I identify, I'm the same way", and tried to describe what his way of thinking sounds like.

If to you it sounds like the exact way of thinking and problem solving as yours or mine, well, then perhaps AndrewKemendo did not describe it well enough. Perhaps it's impossible to describe it to someone else. But the necessary context to his description is that his brain works different from yours or mine. So the short textual description also means something different than what it does for you and me.

Is there the possibility that AndrewKemendo is self-grandiose and not aware that he is not special and his verbose descriptions of his unique way of thinking are nothing but? Sure. But even if we had no other evidence that this is not the case, it would cost you nothing to be curious and assume best intention. But we do have other evidence - and it's in the first line - "There’s no other way to do it for this type of a brain. I know because I have the same type of brain."

[rramadass]

I know you mean well but i am somewhat with biggestbrain1 on this.

The comment just comes off as mere posturing (eg. "I know because I have the same type of brain") and if you actually think about what is written down all i see is empty verbiage and something which could have been said simpler and more directly (for example there is no need to bring in "Markov Processes" here).

Dijkstra's (and Floyd/Hoare's) programming techniques are hard enough to learn that such comments merely obfuscate the essential ideas and pushes people away from trying to study it because it "appears too hard". Things should be made as simple as possible to motivate people to study and learn.

[HPMOR]

These commentaries have such nuance and focus it reads like a work of art. I appreciate the many people who contributed to this thread. A true critical reading of each person's comments. It's absolutely beautiful.

[cangeroo]

Whereas "AndrewKemendo" provided first-hand testimony, which added value in the form of a datapoint, I struggle to see how your opinion of his testimony added any value, other than negativity.

It's fine to dislike something - and just move on.

[foofie]

> Whereas "AndrewKemendo" provided first-hand testimony, which added value in the form of a datapoint, (...)

So did the "In this moment I am euphoric" guy.

I am with biggestbrain here. The post reads like "I'm just like Dijkstra, I solve problems".

[AndrewKemendo]

Why does my description threaten you??

[augustk]

I don't think it threatens anyone, it may simply come across as pretentious.

[AndrewKemendo]

I guess I can understand that.

I’m not making any bold claims about inventing anything or anything like that in fact, there are multiple times where I say I’m not doing anything special.

I’m just describing that my mental process resembles and steps the same way a markov process does (or OODA or SPA if you prefer) and that not everybody thinks like that and that and I found that certain types of scientific thinkers also have that same type of thinking. The Dykstra explanation there lined up with my experience

I cant control how people react to that so :shrug:

[rramadass]

> I cant control how people react to that so :shrug:

No, but you should be aware of how you come across so that people don't dismiss the substance of what you are trying to say because of the form in which you say it.

[amatecha]

Some people don't interpret earnestness correctly, and somehow feel like they have to insult it or make fun of it. I've had people think I'm "using big words to try to sound smart"... I wasn't trying any such thing, I'm just a thoughtful person and verbose, introducing subtlety and thoroughness to each point that I make. I don't care if someone thinks I'm smart or not, but I'm sure as hell never trying to make them think I am because I don't care and never will. If someone would rather hear the 5-year-old-child-tier phrase "I think about how to solve the problem", they can find a conversation with someone else who speaks that way.

[coldtea]

Yeah, in the same way that Moby Dick is a "verbose and ridiculous way of saying "A guy holds a grudge against a whale", and Birth of the Cool is the same as the 8-bit chiptune cover.

The cliff notes summary is not the same as what the parent tries to convey. The nuance in what the parent wrote was the thing that went wooosh.

[Hayatabad]

+1.

[vacuity]

Interesting. I try to do something like this, but way simpler and my productivity is low right now. Maybe more practice will help. Would you say you're usually good at doing this and getting results?

[Denzel]

The Minto Pyramid Principle (MPP) offers an analogous, perhaps more accessible, process to problem solving similar to Andrew’s description.

You use a problem solving process built on structured analysis by first defining the problem in terms of an Undesired Result (R1), Desired Result (R2) — the S and S’ in Andrew’s process. Then, you determine the Starting Point in terms of the logical structures that generate your R1; these structures can be a sequence of cause-effect, a structural decomposition (e.g. of organization, geography, etc.), a classification, or some combination of the three. From this structure you can hypothesize experiments to confirm/disconfirm where the causes are. With these causes in hand, you can generate possible solutions or corrective actions. Finally, you’d evaluate your alternatives and arrive at your solution to move from R1->R2.

MPP’s problem solving process has the additional advantage of structuring your actions/results in a way that makes writing a document or presentation simple and straightforward, to convince others for example.

Check out the book if you’re interested in improving your problem solving and analysis skills.

[AndrewKemendo]

Thanks for this. Very interesting indeed

[AndrewKemendo]

At this point, I consider it deterministic in terms of efficacy

So you can basically hand me any problem and I will implement this process, and I have a high success rate for delivering desired outcomes.

And again, this isn’t really like my process I invented. It boils down into a practical implementation of a Markoff process in planning as applied to any set of tasks such they could be discretely described as a state machine.

The key challenge IMO is in describing the state machine, and that is what takes a lot of elucidation.

In many cases we don’t have the ability to precisely describe a process as a state machine because we haven’t defined the boundaries of the system, and then measured it enough, in enough different dimensions, across enough time to be able to give that level of understanding to input an outputs.

[rramadass]

Are you trying to learn Dijkstra/Hoare/Floyd style programming techniques or are you trying to understand the idea of usage of "Markov Processes" (totally unnecessary) in the comment?

[vacuity]

The general problem solving approach. What the two sibling replies to yours are talking about.

[rramadass]

Ah, this is a more general question on which it is hard to give specific suggestions because "problem-solving" can mean anything/everything without knowing your exact context.

However you might want to start with The Thinker's Toolkit by Morgan Jones. This gives you a catalog of models which teaches you to structure your requirements born from problem analysis in various ways to aid problem-solving.

[amatecha]

Yeah, that's awesome! I sometimes find it very challenging to comprehensively "imagine" the end state and all its "moving parts", but I realize the value in doing so, and work at skill (if "skill" is the right word haha)... I can see the power in determining a proper "translation" that goes from the current to the imagined, and that very approach has been extremely beneficial to me in life. Many people have extreme difficulty doing this! I know a couple people who find it nearly impossible to imagine potential futures in the context of a goal or target. They can only deal with the immediate stuff, OR the future goal/target must be plainly and simply outlined to be uhh.. "parseable", if that makes sense. Anyway, thanks for sharing your perspective, I thought it's interesting to read and think about.

[j7ake]

Why are you using a Markov process though to model time-dependent likelihood pathways ?

Doesn’t make sense. Your next step depends on much more than just knowing where you are at S. One needs to account for the history of where you were before.

Or maybe you’re just using technical words with precise meanings to describe a vague imprecise heuristic?

[AndrewKemendo]

> time-dependent likelihood pathways

Future reward trajectories are THE core focus of multi-step MDP, see Sutton [1]

"Now we consider transitions from state-action pair to state-action pair, and learn the value of state-action pairs. Formally these cases are identical: they are both Markov chains with a reward process. The theorems assuring the convergence of state values under TD(0) also apply to the corresponding algorithm for action values: "

I wasn't going to differentiate in my original post between sub-types of "cycles" within increasingly complex MDP's for long sequence reward estimation:

[1]http://incompleteideas.net/book/ebook/node64.html

[j7ake]

You’re just quoting from Sutton’s reinforcement learning book, which proposes a learning algorithm with a Markov process assumption.

Markov processes are nice because they are simple objects and therefore have nice properties and solid mathematical proofs.

Many mathematical models are studied because they have nice theoretical properties and one can prove theorems about them. This should not be mistaken with an actual mechanistic explanation for complex emergent phenomena like human decisions.

[rramadass]

Your question is valid. I think the person is just using bombastic words for something already well-known and simpler. A Markov Chain is just a FSM with probabilistic transition functions and in the limit is just a deterministic FSM when the transition function probability becomes 1.