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points by yorwba 2 days ago | 0 comments

All novel insights expressible as text can be assembled from snippets of existing text. The challenge is "only" that you need to find the right snippets. Hence being a stochastic parrot does not represent an upper bound on capabilities, but a suggestion that if you want your parrot to give you a specific answer, you should arrange for a context where it's statistically likely to be correct.

[–] discreteevent 2 days ago

Are you saying that a complex stateful system cannot generate a state that is not already recorded in text somewhere?

[–] yorwba 1 day ago

No. In a large enough state space, you can of course easily find a state that has never existed before. For example, if you pick a 1024-bit integer uniformly at random, it will certainly be different from any previous 1024-bit integer. However, it's much more difficult to find a new integer that cannot be assembled out of bits taken from previous integers. Composition from a handful of base atoms can cover very large state spaces, and unbounded composition can cover infinite state spaces. Which is why only being able to combine things that already exist is not much of a limitation.

To demonstrate:

"Are you saying that a" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49642931

"complex stateful system" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14881439

"cannot generate a" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45956162

"state that is not already" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43013637

"recorded in text" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44731577

"somewhere?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50391679

A novel state, obtainable by combining six existing ones.