Did you get around to writing a longer answer to the question, “How do humans do anything in practice if the search space is vast?” I’d be curious to see your thoughts.
My answer to this question is that: (a) Most day-to-day problems can be solved from far away using a low-dimensional space containing natural abstractions. For example, a manager at a company can give their team verbal instructions without describing the detailed sequence of muscle movements needed. (b) For unsolved problems in science, we get many tries at the problem. So, we can use the scientific method to design many experiments which give us enough bits to locate the solution. For example, a drug discovery team can try thousands of compounds in their search for a new drug. The drug discovery team gets to test each compound on the condition they’re trying to treat—so, they can get many bits about which compounds could be effective.
Did you get around to writing a longer answer to the question, “How do humans do anything in practice if the search space is vast?” I’d be curious to see your thoughts.
My answer to this question is that:
(a) Most day-to-day problems can be solved from far away using a low-dimensional space containing natural abstractions. For example, a manager at a company can give their team verbal instructions without describing the detailed sequence of muscle movements needed.
(b) For unsolved problems in science, we get many tries at the problem. So, we can use the scientific method to design many experiments which give us enough bits to locate the solution. For example, a drug discovery team can try thousands of compounds in their search for a new drug. The drug discovery team gets to test each compound on the condition they’re trying to treat—so, they can get many bits about which compounds could be effective.