Thanks. It looks like all the realistic examples I had of weak HCH are actually examples of strong HCH after all, so I’m looking for some examples of weak HCH to help my understanding. I can see how weak HCH would compute the answer to a “naturally linear recursive” problem (like computing factorials) but how would weak HCH answer a question like “Should I get laser eye surgery?” (to take an example from here). The natural way to decompose a problem like this seems to use branching.
Also, I just looked again at Alex Zhu’s FAQ for Paul’s agenda, and Alex’s explanation of weak HCH (in section 2.2.1) seems to imply that it is doing tree recursion (e.g. “I sometimes picture this as an infinite tree of humans-in-boxes, who can break down questions and pass them to other humans-in-boxes”). It seems like either you or Alex must be mistaken here, but I have no idea which.
I just looked at both that and the original strong HCH post, and I think Alex’s explanation is right and I was mistaken: both weak and strong HCH use tree recursion. Edited the original answer to not talk about linear / tree recursion.
Thanks. It looks like all the realistic examples I had of weak HCH are actually examples of strong HCH after all, so I’m looking for some examples of weak HCH to help my understanding. I can see how weak HCH would compute the answer to a “naturally linear recursive” problem (like computing factorials) but how would weak HCH answer a question like “Should I get laser eye surgery?” (to take an example from here). The natural way to decompose a problem like this seems to use branching.
Also, I just looked again at Alex Zhu’s FAQ for Paul’s agenda, and Alex’s explanation of weak HCH (in section 2.2.1) seems to imply that it is doing tree recursion (e.g. “I sometimes picture this as an infinite tree of humans-in-boxes, who can break down questions and pass them to other humans-in-boxes”). It seems like either you or Alex must be mistaken here, but I have no idea which.
I just looked at both that and the original strong HCH post, and I think Alex’s explanation is right and I was mistaken: both weak and strong HCH use tree recursion. Edited the original answer to not talk about linear / tree recursion.