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TobyBartels comments on Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps - Less Wrong
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There is a pattern to what kinds of heaps the Pebblesorters find "right" and "wrong", but they haven't figured it out yet. They have always just used their intuition to decide if a heap was right or wrong, but their intuition got less precise in extreme cases like very large heaps. The Pebblesorters would have been better off if only they could have figured out the pattern and applied it to extreme heaps, rather than fighting over differences of intuition.
Also if they had just figured out the pattern, they could have programmed it into the AI rather than hoping that the AI's intuition would be exactly the same as their own, or manually programming the AI with every special case.
I think this was the main point of the essay but it went right over my head at first.
But it seems weird to me that they have computers and algorithms if they can't figure out this pattern. That messed with my suspension of disbelief for a bit.
Well if the pattern was too complicated, then a reader of the blog post wouldn't be able to notice it.
Sure, that explains why the story was written with this flaw, but it doesn't remove the flaw. But I don't have a better suggestion.