I’m reminded of http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html..
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher. “So that the room will be empty.” At that moment, Sussman was enlightened. From: Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of Roger Frye <[email protected]> Date: Sunday, October 18, 2026 at 12:02 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Put the fries in the bag, Terry. Hurrah, Jon! On Oct 18, 2026, at 12:51 PM, Jon Zingale <[email protected]> wrote: One thing that continues to bore me about the whole thing is that what seems to most surprise Strogatz is still just interpolation. He feels that the unit distance problem is creative because there are these two highly developed areas of mathematics where researchers failed historically to look for functors between. Ok, yeah, I get it. As an institutional doctoral student, one is likely to be handed a small segment of one of these interpolation problems so that they can work toward it while showing the world that the accreditation is deserved. That kind of thing never really impresses me, maybe it should. I don't care much for industrial education anyway. I think it is novel that all these years later, my favorite introduction to Number Theory (Niven 2 or 5) is effectively *just* a retelling of Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. Before the usual objection is made, about humans not being all that special because if I can say what humans do (in language) then I have effectively stated a recipe and some Turing machine can halt. I suspect LLMs can be made to do the thing I would like to see, ML already does things like enhanced sampling (weighted ensemble, etc...). It will eventually happen and I will be impressed when these machines begin to scout effectively beyond the convex hull. Because I tend to believe that there is no free lunch, this effective extrapolation will be ugly just as it is for us, for ants, for anything. I suppose my objection is that if we become self-satisfied with what these machines are doing we may fail to continue looking at what legacy systems do surprisingly well. .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
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