This is a surprisingly easy post to review, and my take is that the core mathematical result is accurate, given the assumptions (it’s very hard to predict where the pinball will go next exactly without infinite compute, even over a surprisingly low amount of bounces), but the inferred result that this means that there are limits to what an intelligence could do in controlling the world is wrong, because the difficulty of predicting something is unrelated to the difficulty of controlling something, and more importantly this claim here is wrong, and it’s easy to give an example in the real world for why it’s wrong, and this is a core claim around the limits of AI in this piece:
If you cannot predict what will happen, you cannot plan a strategy that allows you to perform consistently well.
Gwern’s tweet provides a very easy counterexample here (quoting it rather than linking due to tweets being protected:
Their own pinball example refutes them. (Pinball pros can play pinball and not lose a ball for literally days; the main limitation is their own physical & mental fatigue.)
This is a surprisingly easy post to review, and my take is that the core mathematical result is accurate, given the assumptions (it’s very hard to predict where the pinball will go next exactly without infinite compute, even over a surprisingly low amount of bounces), but the inferred result that this means that there are limits to what an intelligence could do in controlling the world is wrong, because the difficulty of predicting something is unrelated to the difficulty of controlling something, and more importantly this claim here is wrong, and it’s easy to give an example in the real world for why it’s wrong, and this is a core claim around the limits of AI in this piece:
Gwern’s tweet provides a very easy counterexample here (quoting it rather than linking due to tweets being protected:
More generally, this comment is useful:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/epgCXiv3Yy3qgcsys/you-can-t-predict-a-game-of-pinball#wjLFhiWWacByqyu6a
The fact that there’s any correct mathematics at all is why I’d not give it a −9, but the post is still misleading enough that it deserves a −4 vote.