bunchberry

@bunchberry@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends upon what you mean by realism. If you just mean belief in a physical reality independent of a conscious observer, I am not really of the opinion you need MWI to have a philosophically realist perspective.

  For some reason, everyone intuitively accepts the relativity of time and space in special relativity as an ontological feature of the world, but when it comes to the relativity of the quantum state, people’s brains explode and they start treating it like it has to do with “consciousness” or “subjectivity” or something and that if you accept it then you’re somehow denying the existence of objective reality. I have seen this kind of mentality throughout the literature and it has never made sense to me.

  Even Eugene Wigner did this, when he proposed the “Wigner’s friend” thought experiment, he points out how two different observers can come to describe the same system differently, and then concludes that proves quantum mechanics is deeply connected to “consciousness.” But we have known that two observers can describe the same system differently since Galileo first introduced the concept of relativity back in 1632. There is no reason to take it as having anything to do with consciousness or subjectivity or anything like that.

  (You can also treat the wavefunction nomologically as well, and then the nomological behavior you’d expect from particles would be relative, but the ontological-nomological distinction is maybe getting too much into the weeds of philosophy here.)

  I am partial to the way the physicist Francois-Igor Pris puts it. Reality exists as independently of the conscious observer, but not independently from context. You have to specify the context in which you are making an ontological claim for it to have physical meaning. This context can be that of the perspective of a conscious observer, but nothing about the observer is intrinsic here, what is intrinsic is the context, and that is just one of many possible contexts an ontological claim can be made. Two observers can describe the same train to be traveling at different velocities, not because they are conscious observers, but because they are describing the same train from different contexts.

  The philosopher Jocelyn Benoist and the physicist Francois-Igor Pris have argued that the natural world does have a kind of an inherent observer-observed divide but that these terms are misleading being “subject” tends to imply a human subject and “observer” tends to imply a conscious observer, and that a lot of the confusion is cleared up once you figure out how to describe this divide in a more neutral, non-anthropomorphic way, which they settle on talking about the “reality” and the “context.” The reality of the velocity of the train will be different in different contexts. You don’t have to invoke “observer-dependence” to describe relativity. Hence, you can indeed describe quantum theory as a theory of physical reality independent of the observer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  MWI very specifically commits to the existence of a universal wavefunction. Everett’s original paper is literally titled “The Theory of the Universal Wavefunction.” If you instead only take relative states seriously, that position is much closer to relational quantum mechanics. In fact, Carlo Rovelli explicitly describes RQM as adopting Everett’s relative-state idea while rejecting the notion of a universal quantum state.

  MWI claims there exists a universal quantum state, but quantum theory works perfectly well without this assumption if quantum states are taken to be fundamentally relative. Every quantum state is defined in relation to something else, which is made clear by the Wigner’s friend scenario where different observers legitimately assign different states to the same system. If states are fundamentally relative, then a “universal” quantum state makes about as much sense as a “universal velocity” in Galilean relativity.

  You could arbitrarily choose a reference frame in Galilean relativity and declare it universal, but this requires an extra postulate, is unnecessary for the theory, and is completely arbitrary. Likewise, you could pick some observer’s perspective and call that the universal wavefunction, but there is no non-arbitrary reason to privilege it. That wavefunction would still be relative to that observer, just with special status assigned by fiat.

  Worse, such a perspective could never truly be universal because it could not include itself. To do that you would need another external perspective, leading to infinite regress. You never obtain a quantum state that includes the entire universe. Any state you define is always relative to something within the universe, unless you define it relative to something outside of the universe, but at that point you are talking about God and not science.

  The analogy to Galilean relativity actually is too kind. Galilean relativity relies on Euclidean space as a background, allowing an external viewpoint fixed to empty coordinates. Hilbert space is not a background space at all; it is always defined in terms of physical systems. You can transform perspectives in spacetime, but there is no transformation to a background perspective in Hilbert space because no such background exists. The closet that exists is a statistical transformation to different perspectives within Liouville space, but this only works for objects within the space; you cannot transform to the perspective of the background itself as it is not a background space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
  1. Entanglement is just a mathematical property of the theory. If it is sufficient to explain measurement then there is not anything particularly unique about MWI since you can employ this explanation within anything. You also say I missed your point by repeating exactly what I said.
  2. You’re the one giving this bullet point list as if you are debunking all of my points one-by-one. If you agree there is nothing especially “more local” about MWI than any other interpretation then why not just ignore that point and move on?
  3. A relative state is not an entangled state. Again you need to read the papers I linked. We are talking about observer-dependence in the sense of how the velocity of a train in Galilean relativity can be said to have a different value simultaneously for two different observers. I drew the direct comparison here in order to explain that in my first comment. This isn’t about special relativity or general relativity, but about “relativity” in a more abstract sense of things which are only meaningfully defined as a relational property between systems. The quantum state observer A assigns to a system can be different from the quantum state observer B assigns to the system (see the Wigner’s friend thought experiment). The quantum state in quantum mechanics is clearly relative in this sense, and to claim there is a universal quantum state requires an additional leap which is never mathematically justified.
  4. Please for the love of god just scroll up and read what I actually wrote in that first post and respond to it. Or don’t. You clearly seem to be entirely uninterested in a serious conversation. I assume you have an emotional attachment to MWI without even having read Everett’s papers and getting too defensive that you refuse to engage seriously in anything I say, so I am ending this conversation here.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
  1. Not sure what this first point means. To describe decoherence you need something like density matrix notation or Liouville notation which is mathematically much more complicated. For example, a qubit’s state vector grows by 2^N, but if you represent it in Liouville notation then the vector grows by 4^N. It is far more mathematically complicated as a description. Your second point also agrees with me. We know the Born rule is real because we can observe real outcomes on measurement devices, something which MWI denies exists.
  2. This is also true in Copenhagen. Again, if that’s your criterion for locality then Copenhagen is also local.
  3. I think you should read Everett’s papers “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics” and “The Theory of the Universal Wave Function” to see the difference between wavefunctions defined in a relative sense vs a universal sense. You will encounter this with any paper on the topic. I’m a bit surprised you genuinely have never heard of the concept of the universal wavefunction yet are defending MWI?
  4. That quotation does not come one iota close to even having the air of giving the impression of loosely responding to what I wrote. You are not seriously engaging with what I wrote at all.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The Many Worlds interpretation is rather unconvincing to me for many reasons.

  |1| It claims it is “simpler” just by dropping the Born rule, but it is mathematically impossible to derive the Born rule from the Schrodinger equation alone. You must include some additional assumption to derive it, and so it ends up necessarily having to introduce an additional postulate at some point to derive the Born rule from. Its number of assumptions thus always equal that of any other interpretation but with additional mathematical complexity caused by the derivation.

  • arxiv.org/abs/2402.17066

  |2| It claims to be “local” because there is no nonlocal wavefunction collapse. But the EPR paper already proves it’s mathematically impossible for something to match the predictions of quantum theory and be causally local if there are no hidden variables. This is obscured by the fact that MWI proponents like to claim the Born rule probabilities are a subjective illusion and not physically rule, but illusions still have a physical cause that need to be physically explained, and any explanation you give must reproduce Born rule probabilities, and thus must violate causal locality. Some MWI proponents try to get around this by redefining locality in terms of relativistic locality, but even Copenhagen is local in that sense, so you end up with no benefits over Copenhagen if you accept that redefinition.

  • arxiv.org/abs/0706.2661v1
  • arxiv.org/abs/2306.07794

  |3| It relies on belief that there exists an additional mathematical entity Ψ as opposed to just ψ, but there exists no mathematical definition or derivation of this entity. Even Everett agreed that all the little ψ we work with in quantum theory are relative states, but then he proposes that there exists an absolute universal Ψ, but to me this makes about as much sense as claiming there exists a universal velocity in Galilean relativity. There is no way to combine relative velocities to give you a universal velocity, they are just fundamentally relative. Similarly, wavefunctions in quantum mechanics are fundamentally relative. A universal wavefunction does not meaningfully exist.

  • arxiv.org/abs/2012.05712

  |4| You describe MWI as kind of a copying of the world into different branches where different observers see different outcomes of the experiment, but that is not what MWI actually claims. MWI claims the Born rule is a subjective illusion and all that exists is the Schrodinger equation, but the Schrodinger equation never branches. If, for example, a photon hits a beam splitter with a 50% chance of passing through and a 50% chance of being reflected and you have a detector on either side, the Schrodinger equation will never evolve into a state that looks anything like it having past through or it having been reflected. Indeed, even those probabilities I gave you come from the Born rule.

  This was something Einstein pointed out in relation to atomic decay, that no matter how long you evolve the Schrodinger equation, it never evolves into a state that looks anything like decay vs non-decay. If the universe really is just the Schrodinger equation, you simply cannot say that it branches into two “worlds” where in one you see one outcome and in another you see a different outcome, because the Schrodinger equation never gives you that. You would have to claim that the entire world consists of a single evolving infinite-dimensional universal wavefunction that is nothing akin to anything we have ever observed before.

  There is a good lecture below by Maudlin on this problem, that MWI presents a theory which has no connection to observable reality because nothing within the theory contains any observables.

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=us7gbWWPUsA

  Rovelli also comments on it:

  The gigantic, universal ψ wave that contains all the possible worlds is like Hegel’s dark night in which all cows are black: it does not account, per se, for the phenomenological reality that we actually observe. In order to describe the phenomena that we observe, other mathematical elements are needed besides ψ: the individual variables, like X and P, that we use to describe the world. The Many Worlds interpretation does not explain them clearly. It is not enough to know the ψ wave and Schrödinger’s equation in order to define and use quantum theory: we need to specify an algebra of observables, otherwise we cannot calculate anything and there is no relation with the phenomena of our experience. The role of this algebra of observables, which is extremely clear in other interpretations, is not at all clear in the Many Worlds interpretation.
  

  — Carlo Rovelli, “Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's it going to take to truly stop the US?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Obvious answer is that the USA is the world’s largest economy while Russia is not, so if USA says “if you trade with Russia then you can’t trade with me” then most countries will happily accept ceasing trade with Russia to remain in the US market but if Russia says the same about the USA then people would just laugh and go trade with the USA.

  The only country that might have some leverage in sanctioning the US is China but China has historically had a “no allies” policy. Chinese leadership hate the idea of that because then they would feel obligated to defend them and defending another country is viewed very poorly in Chinese politics. They thus only ever form trade relations and never alliances, meaning if your country is attacked they have no obligation to you. Chinese politicians may verbally condemn the attack but they won’t do anything like sanctions or even provide their own military support in return.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨a real danger of quantum computing⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Trying to think of classical models to explain the EPR paradox kinda misses the point of the EPR paradox, because the point of the EPR paradox is to assume that there is indeed nothing linking the two particles until you look to then show you that this leads to a contradiction with Einstein’s definition of locality.† You can indeed trivially think of classical explanations to explain the EPR paradox and how the +1 and -1 particles might be linked and predetermined, but that’s not the point of the EPR paper which is to explore what happens if we don’t make this assumption.

  The paper that instead explores what happens if we do assume they are predetermined is Bell’s theorem, and Bell’s theorem is more complicated than just assuming that the particles are entangled and opposites such that one will be measured to be +1 and the other to be -1. Bell’s theorem shows that the behavior of the individual particle can be dependent upon the configuration of a collection of measurement devices, even if the particle only ever interacts with one measurement device in the collection. That not only violates Einstein’s definition of locality, but if you try to make it deterministic, it ends up violating special relativity as well.

  The simplest demonstration of this is with three particles in the GHZ experiment. The point is, again, not merely that the particles have correlated values but that (1) those values are statistically dependent upon the configuration of the measurement device and (2) the values for an individual particle can be statistically dependent upon the configuration of a collection of measurement devices even if it never interacts with most of the devices in the collection.

  † “Locality” is used in two different senses in the literature. One is relativistic locality which means nothing can travel faster than light. The other is what I like to call coordinate locality which is what Einstein had in mind with the EPR paper, which is the idea that things have to locally interact to become dependent upon one another. The EPR paper is a proof by contradiction that quantum mechanics without hidden variables violates coordinate locality specifically.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨a real danger of quantum computing⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In Copenhagen, “observing” really does just mean “observing” in the colloquial sense, there isn’t a fancy scientific meaning for it as the “collapse” is treated as a subjective update of knowledge and not a physical event.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand credit scores⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Banks aren’t that strict about super high credit scores. You can have a low score and they’d still give you a loan as long as it’s not absurdly low and you don’t have a bunch of other outstanding loans and you have an income. At least in my experience, my “credit” was basically one credit card I owned for a year and the bank still gave me a loan for a house. I would not bother to stress too much about the specific number. If your credit score is so low you won’t be able to secure a loan, you’d probably know without looking anyways. Just make sure you at least have one credit card because otherwise you might not have any credit at all which can make it hard to secure a loan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We wouldn't listen, anyway.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re wrong. I’m a great ape and I can understand abstract language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A double-standard is not inherently a bad thing. It’s a double-standard that we allow trained and licensed medical doctors to do operations on people but not bozos without any medical background, but one would have to be an imbecile to say this double-standard is a bad thing. It is indeed a double-standard to not show empathy to people who support industrial scale genocide to themselves be merked while believing we should show empathy to the victims and to people who do not advocate for such things when they die, but it is a good double-standard. It’s completely ridiculous to think we should be applying a single universal standard to everyone because people are not all the same.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Bullet-proof vest wouldn’t have saved him as he was sniped in the neck. The head is a moving target and harder to hit, which is why the less professional sniper missed Trump, he tried to shoot him in the head and Trump happened to move his head at that very second, and aiming for center of mass can be risky in case they are wearing something bullet proof. The neck is clearly exposed and more stable of a target than the head. The sniper knew what they were doing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Literally right-wingers 24/7 are praising political violence, calling for the eradication of all Palestinians, glorifying the gunning down or running over of protestors, praising the murder of homeless people, praising the execution of minorities by cops, constantly glorifying the suicide rate of trans people, etc. Literally you can go on Twitter and find any of these right-wing accounts crying about how we shouldn’t glorify violence and read their post history and you will likely not even have to go back more than 1 day to find them glorifying violence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have seen so many right wingers post something along the lines of “leftists are so psychotic for being happy he was killed, we should kill all leftists in response!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨observes your slit⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The interference pattern disappears if anything becomes entangled with the which-way information at all. You can replace the entire measurement device with a single particle that interacts with the particles at the slits in such a way that it becomes perfectly correlated with the which-way information that the observer has no awareness of (such as if a moat of dust interacts with the particle because the experimenter did not isolate it well) and that is sufficient for the interference pattern to disappear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too soon?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It comes across to me as they simply lack empathy for other “kinds” of people. If you actually felt the same pain and empathy when watching the video of Kirk get merked, you should feel that a thousand times over when seeing a thousand videos of the IOF massacring children, many sniped in the same way Kirk got merked, and then you should look upon Kirk in disgust for supporting that and dehumanizing the Palestinian people. But the fact is these people don’t. They don’t see other “kinds” of people different from them as in fact “people.” Let’s be real, they don’t feel the same kind of empathy for Palestinian fathers dying as they do a white fascist dying. They constantly mock the deaths of minority groups like trans people. They suddenly have empathy and demand pacifism and valuing the sanctity of all life when a white fascist dies, but are silent in every other cas.e

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨observes your slit⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t even explain it in physics class. That is kind of the schtick of the Copenhagen interpretation. You just assume as a postulate that systems are in classical states when you look at them and in quantum states when you do not, and from those two assumptions you can prove using Gleason’s theorem that the only possible way the former can map onto the latter is through the Born rule. But there is no explanation given at all as to how or when or by what mechanism this transition actually takes place.

  Many Worlds isn’t much better because they posit that the classical world does not even exist, yet that clearly contradicts with what we directly observe in experiments, so if that is true it necessarily means that the classical world is an illusion, and so then you still have to explain how the illusion comes about, which they do not. Dropping the postulate that there is indeed a classical world also disallows you from deriving the Born rule through Gleason’s theorem, and so it then becomes unclear how to do it at all without some arbitrary additional postulate, and the arbitrary nature of it means there are dozens of proposals of different postulates and no way to decide between them.

  Modern physics is of the form (1) there is a classical state, (2) you look at it, (3) a miracle happens, (4) you perceive a quantum state, and then you are repeatedly gaslit into believing quantum mechanics is a complete theory of nature and it’s impossible for there to ever be anything more fundamental than it and any physicist who thinks there might be, even if they are literally Albert Einstein, is a crank crackpot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A conundrum⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They are NOT looking to see if you are responsible with money. They are looking to see if they can make money off of you, so they want you to be a heavy credit user. Before I bought my house I made sure to take out two credit cards and just buy random shit on them for a few months because that boosts my credit score drastically which then made it easy to get the loan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientific unprogress...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Periodic table is for atoms. I think you are mixing it up with the standard model, which is for subatomic particles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISO 26300⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would do my work in Open Office at home, save it to doc/docx, then when it is entirely completed, I will bring it to the library to load it in Word on a library computer and correct any formatting issues and resave it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Misogyny or something... Idk⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  it’s hard for us male gays, always being made fun of 😔

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not stealing⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well if there was public daycare to take the stress off of parents who couldn’t deal with it then it wouldn’t be as big of an issue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨when ur higher than sagan⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  yeah yeah I’m sure quantum mechanics makes us all immortal if that makes you feel better 🤣

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memories of a bygone era⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  i use one of those trackball mice with the ball on top. first time i tried it i never went back, no need to worry about having a proper surface or desk space for a mouse ever again. if you reach the side of your desk using an optical mouse, you have to pick the mouse up and move it all the way to the other side of the desk, while is a proper ball mouse (a good one without too much resistance) when you flick the ball it can continue spinning a bit even as you release it, so you can flick it to the side and then bend your wrist slightly to then flick it again, and the mouse cursor will just continue moving without stopping, which in games you can do this to have endless turning around, when turning is always stuttery on an optical mouse due to hitting the end of the desk. it takes a little bit to get used to, but at least a good one with limited resistance and a large ball, you can easily get just as accurate as an optical mouse as well. the only downside i find is that i do have to take the trackball out and clean it like the ones on the bottom.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone else think the NYPD photos of the UHC CEO shooting suspect don’t match?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, the jacket is very different as well if you look at the front chest area. While people do say maybe he just changed his clothes, the problem is if he also changed his backpack, he couldn’t have just put the clothes in the backpack, meaning he would’ve had to have left them somewhere and there would’ve been a trail that probably would’ve been found by now. It doesn’t really add up for them to be the same person.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tipping culture is out of control, even the cops expect tips now!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  How do we even know that’s the killer? The person who shot was wearing a mask. For all we know it wasn’t even a man, some women are flat chested it’s possible. They should probably just call off the investigation since there’s no clues for anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨1+1=⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  In boolean algebra 1+1=0.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SHINY⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s always funny seeing arguments like this as someone with a computer science education. A lot of people act like you can’t have anything complex unless some intelligent being deterministically writes a lot of if-else statements to implement it, which requires them to know and understand in detail what they are implementing at every step.

  But what people don’t realize is that this is not how it works at all, there are many problems that are just impractical to actually “know” how to solve yet we solve them all the time, such as voice recognition. Nobody in human history has ever written a bunch of if-else statements to be able to accurately translate someone’s voice to text, because it’s too complicated of a problem, no one on earth knows how it works.

  Yet, of course, your phone can do voice recognition just fine. That is because you can put together a generic class of algorithms which find solutions to problems on their own, without you even understanding the problem. These algorithms are known as metaheuristics. Metaheuristics fundamentally cannot be deterministic, they require random noise to work properly, because something that is deterministic will always greedily go in the direction of a more correct solution, and will never explore more incorrect solutions, whereby an even better solution may be beyond the horizon of many incorrect ones. Technically speaking, we would say they get stuck in a local minimum.

  A simple example of a metaheuristic is that of annealing. If you want to strengthen a sword, you can heat up the metal really hot and let it slowly cool. While it’s really hot, the atoms in the sword will randomly explore different configurations, and as it cools, they will explore less and less, and the overall process leads them to finding rather optimal configurations that strengthen the crystaline structure of the metal.

  This simple process can actually be applied generally to solve pretty much any problem. For example, if you are trying to figure out the optimal route to deliver packages, you can simulate this annealing process but rather than atoms searching for an optimal crystaline structure, you have different orders of stops on a graph searching for the shortest path. The “temperature” would be a variable that represents how much random exploration you are willing to accept, i.e. if you alter the configuration and it’s worse, how much worse does it have to be for you to not accept it. A higher temperature would accept worse solutions, at very low temperatures you would only accept solutions that improve upon the route.

  I once implemented this algorithm to solve sudoku puzzles and it was very quick at doing so.

  There are tons of metaheuristic algorithms, and much of them we learn from nature, like annealing, however, there’s also genetic algorithms. The random exploration is done through random mutations through each generation, but the deterministic and greedy aspect of it is the fact that only the most optimal generations are chosen to produce the next generation. This is also a generic algorithm that can be applied to solve any problem. You can see a person here who uses a genetic algorithm to teach a computer how to fly a plane during a simulation.

  Modern AI is based on neural networks, which the greedy aspect of them is something called backpropagation, although this on its own is not a metaheuristic, but modern AI tech arguably qualifies because it does not actually work until you introduce random exploration like a method known as drop out whereby you randomly remove neurons during training to encourage the neural network to not overfit. Backpropagation+dropout forms a kind of metaheuristic with both a greedy and exploratory aspect to it, and can be used to solve any generic problem.

  Indeed, that’s how we get phones to recognize speech and convert it to text. Nobody sat down and wrote a bunch of if-else statements to translate text into speech. Rather, we took a generic nature-inspired algorithm that can produce solutions for any problem, and just applied it to speech recognition, and kept increasing the amount of compute until it could solve the problem on its own. Once it solves it, the solution it spits out is kind of a black box. You can put in speech as an input, and it gives you text as an output, but nobody really even knows fully what is going on in between.

  People often act like somehow computers could not solve problems unless humans could also solve them, but computers already have solved millions of problems which not only has no human ever solved but no human can even possibly understand the solution the computer spits out. All we know from studying nature is that there are clever ways to combine random exploration and deterministic greed to form processes which can solve any arbitrary problem given enough time and resources, so we just implement those processes into computers and then keep throwing more time and resources at it until it spits out an answer.

  We already understand how nature can produce things without anyone “knowing” how it works, because we do that all the time already!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No need to boil the ocean⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  No, the point is that bacteria can produce toxins in between a company packaging a product and a person receiving it and then boiling it themselves. Companies have to kill the bacteria prior to shipping it. It’s similar to canned foods for example, they put it in the can then heat up the can to kill the bacteria, then ship it, so it shouldn’t have any harmful bacteria in there to begin with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No need to boil the ocean⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Boiling things isn’t guaranteed to make it safe, because sometimes bacteria produce toxins as a byproduct that are heat-stable, so if you kill the bacterial you can still get food poisoning if you drink it.