Thread

1. kingjimmy · 1789588262 · focus · HN ↗

   Aren't optimizations suppose to be deterministic?

   1. cowboylowrez · 1789589158 · focus · HN ↗

      I'd like to contribute my amateur hour entry into this thread, although I did administer and develop mssql stuff for awhile.

      sure optimizations based on stats, but the stats are the wildcard, in my experience query plans can change suddenly.

      Queries are translated into plans according to statistics. However the transforms will be deterministic and should only change one valid plan to another. I could very easily see a neural network manipulate transforms the same way the current programming does, its just that the neural networks are by nature really nicely suitable because the "decisions" are based on training, and this training can be closed world type things like the ai assists that chess engines are now getting. Obviously ai still can't play chess but apparently its very good at ranking board positions just by developing that much statistical info because its training comes not from reading the web, but playing a gazzilian games against itself in a "closed" chess world of its own.

      I'm thinking that the ai does "this legal transform of the query plan should be applied to this pattern of data (statistics, cardinality, etc)" simply because the ai encountered it in closed world training, much like the chess thing.

      Just a theory tho feel free to correct!

      1. krisoft · 1789593218 · focus · HN ↗

         > Obviously ai still can't play chess

         I believe you are wrong on that. Do you mean large language models can’t play chess?

         1. cowboylowrez · 1789594472 · focus · HN ↗

            I don't believe that a pure neural network can currently abide by the rules of chess, even with unreasonable amounts of training. Do you have a counter example? I never mind having beliefs challenged with facts lol

            edit: I think you could provide an AI with a service or skill that asks "is this move legal" but given all the overhead for llms or whatever to call a "legal move" service external to its process, well then you aren't really searching the tree very efficiently lol.

            However if you just let a neural network score boards and the neural network is in the same process well then I think thats the working solution for using neural networks in chess. The net does not need to score all boards either, simple value based heuristics can obviously provide a preliminary list of good boards (moves) at a certain depth or ply and then select the move that produces the board that the neural net scores highest. I kinda sorta think thats whats done today but as usual I could be full of it lol

            1. cannonpalms · 1789606253 · focus · HN ↗

               There's quite a big difference between "AI" and "pure neural networks." No, frontier chess (Alpha zero etc) is not "pure," because there's Monte Carlo tree search and a hard-coded game rules implementation.

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