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okamiueruyesterday at 8:14 PM2 repliesview on HN

The thing about discussing or explaining constraints, is that it rarely is useful or productive if the other side does not accept (or understand) the reality of them.

Turing completeness is not exactly a high bar, and it's genuinely confusing as to why you bring it up. Your C++ precompiler is exactly as intelligent as whatever is your favorite agentic workflow with whatever harness you're referring to. Both might be Turing complete. Neither are intelligent. But one of them seems to be fooling you to think otherwise.

There have been many times that the C++ precompiler produced some output I couldn't understand. I might even at some point thought it was trying to tell me something profound I was too dumb to comprehend. Turns out it was just a missing semicolon.


Replies

tossandthrowyesterday at 8:31 PM

Yes, so there is not reason to believe that you can do computations that the precompiler can not do.

There is no reason to believe that that you can not fully simulate intelligence in a C++ precompiler.

The precompiler can be simulated by human intelligence, and human intelligence can simulate a c++ precompiler.

Again, you are the one who arrogantly say they llms can not be intelligent without supplying any argument for such.

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calftoday at 12:01 AM

I'll bite, I think Turing completeness is relevant in that it has to be used to informally argue via the Church-Turing thesis that biological intelligence cannot exceed the power or expressivity of formal neural network models. It thus is a good counterargument to stochastic parrot dismissals of neural net based AI such as LLMs, which really are still black boxes. The issue is not simply "So you think that humans are as powerful as LaTeX (or vice versa), ha ha how absurd!"