←back to thread

Interview with gwern

(www.dwarkeshpatel.com)
308 points synthmeat | 1 comments | 14 Nov 24 08:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source
Show context
YeGoblynQueenne ◴[14 Nov 24 13:22 UTC] No.42135916[source]▶
This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620

Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, large, section of the community as an important influencer in AI. For me that's just a great example of how basically the vast majority of AI influencers (who vie for influence on social media, rather than research) are basically clueless about AI and CS and only have second-hand knowledge, which I guess they're good at organising and popularising, but not more than that. It's easy to be a cheer leader for the mainstream view on AI. The hard part is finding, and following, unique directions.

With apologies again for the negative slant of the comment.

replies(10): >>42136055 #>>42136148 #>>42136538 #>>42136759 #>>42137041 #>>42137215 #>>42137274 #>>42137284 #>>42137350 #>>42137636 #
empiricus ◴[14 Nov 24 13:55 UTC] No.42136148[source]▶
Minor: if n is finite, then a^nb^n becomes regular?
replies(2): >>42136273 #>>42136285 #
1. YeGoblynQueenne ◴[14 Nov 24 14:12 UTC] No.42136273[source]▶
a^nb^n is regular, but it is also context free. I don't think there's a restriction on the n. Why do you say this?

Edit: sorry, I read "finite" as "infinite" :0 But n can be infinite and a^nb^n is still regular, and also context free. To be clear, the Chomskky Hierarchy of formal languages goes like this:

Finite ⊆ Regular ⊆ Context-Free ⊆ Context-Sensitive ⊆ Recursively Enumerable

That's because formal languages are identified with the automata that accept them and when an automaton accepts e.g. the Recursively Enumerable languages, then it also accepts the context-sensitive languages, and so on all the way down to the finite languages. One way to think of this is that an automaton is "powerful enough" to recognise the set of strings that make up a language.