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pfortunytoday at 10:18 AM3 repliesview on HN

Science is not about results, it is about the transmission of knowledge. So long as those AI-"sciences" are just inside AI, they are "engineering", not science.

I am not dismissing engineering (it moves the world we live in), just trying to clarify what science is.

Applied fluid dynamics works like that: noone has ever really "verified" that the finite-element method applied to some specific model does converge


Replies

jvanderbottoday at 10:23 AM

Agree, but more specifically Math is clearly about a human understanding structure of things. Math is basically for humans. It's one of the main reasons understandable proof is so important.

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varjagtoday at 10:51 AM

Engineering is used fairly loosely these days but I insist engineering ends where you have to prove theorems.

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jdw64today at 10:59 AM

So what I’m most curious about is this: if there are axioms and proofs so enormous that a human could never prove them in a lifetime, but a machine can, does that make it engineering? That’s the point I’m really wondering about.

I mean, what if a human could follow every single step of the process in principle, but the sheer volume is so vast that a human can never see the whole thing—would that be engineering?

But I don’t think of that as engineering. In the future, maybe it will be called an Oracle

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