[HN Gopher] Arc Prize 2024 Winners and Technical Report
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Arc Prize 2024 Winners and Technical Report
        
       Author : alphabetting
       Score  : 119 points
       Date   : 2024-12-06 19:20 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arcprize.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arcprize.org)
        
       | mikeknoop wrote:
       | Author here -- six months ago we launched ARC Prize, a huge $1M
       | experiment, to test if we need new ideas for AGI. The ARC-AGI
       | benchmark remains unbeaten and I think we can now definitely say
       | "yes".
       | 
       | One big update since June is that progress is no longer stalled.
       | Coming into 2024, the public consensus vibe was that pure deep
       | learning / LLMs would continue scaling to AGI. The fundamental
       | architecture of these systems hasn't changed since ~2019.
       | 
       | But this flipped late summer. AlphaProof and o1 are evidence of
       | this new reality. All frontier AI systems are now incorporating
       | components beyond pure deep learning like program synthesis and
       | program search.
       | 
       | I believe ARC Prize played a role here too. All the winners this
       | year are leveraging new AGI reasoning approaches like deep-
       | learning guided program synthesis, and test-time training/fine-
       | tuning. We'll be seeing a lot more of these in frontier AI
       | systems in coming years.
       | 
       | And I'm proud to say that all the code and papers from this
       | year's winners are now open source!
       | 
       | We're going to keep running this thing annually until its
       | defeated. And we've got ARC-AGI-2 in the works to improve on
       | several of the v1 flaws (more here:
       | https://arcprize.org/blog/arc-prize-2024-winners-technical-r...)
       | 
       | The ARC-AGI community keeps surprising me. From initial launch,
       | through o1 testing, to the final 48 hours when the winning team
       | jumped 10% and both winning papers dropped out of nowhere. I'm
       | incredibly grateful to everyone and we will do our best to
       | steward this attention towards AGI.
       | 
       | We'll be back in 2025!
        
         | mrandish wrote:
         | Congrats to you and Francois on the success of ARC-AGI 24 and
         | thanks so much for doing it. I just finished the technical
         | report and am encouraged! It's great to finally see some
         | tangible progress in research that is both novel and plausibly
         | in fruitful directions.
        
         | tbalsam wrote:
         | As a rather experienced ML researcher, ARC is a great benchmark
         | on its own, but is punching below its weight in terms of
         | claiming that it is a gate (or in terms of this post -- a
         | "steward") towards AGI, and in my perspective and the
         | perspective of several researchers near me this has watered
         | down the value of the ARC benchmark as a test.
         | 
         | It is a great unit test for reasoning -- that's fantastic! And
         | maybe it is indeed the best way to test for this -- who knows
         | exactly. But the claim is a little grandiose for what it is,
         | this is somewhat similar to saying that testing on string
         | parity is the One True Test for testing an optimizer's
         | efficiency.
         | 
         | I'd heartily recommend maybe taking down the marketing vibrance
         | down a notch and keep things a bit more measured, it's not
         | entirely a meme, though some of the more-serious researchers
         | don't take it as seriously as a result. And that's the kind of
         | people that you want to attract to this sort of thing!
         | 
         | I think there is a potentially good future for ARC! But it
         | might struggle to attract some of the kind of talent that you
         | want to work on this problem as a result.
        
           | mikeknoop wrote:
           | > I'd heartily recommend maybe taking down the marketing
           | vibrance down a notch and keep things a bit more measured,
           | it's not entirely a meme, though some of the more-serious
           | researchers don't take it as seriously as a result.
           | 
           | This is fair critique. ARC Prize's 2024 messaging was sharp
           | to break through the noise floor -- ARC has been around since
           | 2019 but most only learned about it this summer. Now that it
           | has garnered awareness, it is no longer useful, and in same
           | cases hurting progress like you point out. The messaging
           | needs to evolve and mature next year to be more
           | neutral/academic.
        
             | tbalsam wrote:
             | I feel rather consternated that this response effectively
             | boils down to "yes, we know we overhyped this to get
             | people's attention, and now that we have it we can be more
             | honest about it". Fighting for place in the attention
             | economy is understandable, being deceptive about it is not.
             | 
             | This is part of the ethical morass of why some more serious
             | researchers aren't touching the benchmark. People are not
             | going to take it seriously if it continues like this!
        
               | mikeknoop wrote:
               | I think we agree; to clarify, sharp messaging isn't
               | inaccurate messaging. And I believe the story is not
               | overhyped given the evidence: the benchmark resisted a
               | $1M prize pool for ~6 months. But I concede we did obsess
               | about the story to give it the best chance of survival in
               | the marketplace of ideas against the incumbent AI
               | research meme (LLM scaling). Now that the AI research
               | field is coming around to the idea that something beyond
               | deep learning is needed, the story matters less, and the
               | benchmark, and future versions, can stand on their
               | utility as a compass towards AGI.
        
               | tbalsam wrote:
               | > Now that the AI research field is coming around to the
               | idea that something beyond deep learning is needed,
               | 
               | I have not heard this from anyone that I work with! It
               | would be a curious violation of info theory were this to
               | be the case.
               | 
               | Certainly, some things cannot efficiently be learned from
               | data. This is a case where some other kind of inductive
               | bias or prior is needed (again, from info theory) -- but
               | replacing deep learning entirely would be rather silly.
               | 
               | Part of the reason that a number of researchers don't
               | take the benchmark more seriously is because it's meant
               | to cripple the results. For example, in the name of
               | reducing brute force search, the compute was severely
               | limited! This turned many off to begin with. The general
               | contention as I understand was to let compute be a
               | reasonable amount, but this would not play well with the
               | numbers game. Because if you restrict compute beyond a
               | reasonable point, it makes the numbers artificially low
               | for people who don't know what's going on behind the
               | scenes. And this ends up biasing the results unreasonably
               | to favor the original messaging, (i.e., "We need
               | something other than deep learning.")
               | 
               | If it was structured with a reasonable amount of compute,
               | and instead, time-accuracy gates were used for prizes, it
               | would be much more open. But people do not use it because
               | the game is rigged to begin with!
               | 
               | Unfortunately due to that, plus the consistent goal-post
               | moving of the benchmark is why it's generally not really
               | held with staying power in the research community -- the
               | messaging changes based upon what is convenient for
               | publicity, and there's unfortunately been a history of
               | similar things in the past in the pedigree leading up to
               | the ARC prize itself.
               | 
               | It is not entirely unsalvageable, but there really needs
               | to be a turnaround of how the competition and prize is
               | managed in order to win back people's trust. Placing a
               | thumb on the scales to confirm a prior bias/previous
               | messaging may work for a little while, but over time it
               | robs the metric of its usability over time as the greater
               | research community loses trust.
        
               | WhitneyLand wrote:
               | I think you're overly fixated on some minor points
               | relative to the overall utility on offer here. And also
               | skewing the facts a bit. For example at one point you
               | quote the OP on words that were never said as far as I
               | can see. At another point, you characterize their
               | position as "replacing deep learning entirely" which, as
               | far as I can tell, has never been advocated for in this
               | comment thread or on behalf of ARC.
        
               | tbalsam wrote:
               | That is an understandable statement, and probably fair as
               | well I feel.
               | 
               | Much of this comes in reference to statements from
               | fchollet w.r.t. replacing deep learning -- around the
               | time of the initial prize, with a lot of the much more
               | hype marketing, this was essentially the thru-line that
               | was used, and it left a bitter taste in a number of
               | peoples' mouths. W.r.t. misquoting, they did say that we
               | needed something "beyond" deep learning, not "other than"
               | here, and that is on me.
               | 
               | The utility is certainly still present, if I feel
               | diminished, and it probably is a case of my own
               | frustrations due to previous similar issues leading up to
               | the ARC prize.
               | 
               | That being said, I do agree in retrospect that my
               | response skewed from being objective -- it is a benchmark
               | with a mixed history, but that doesn't mean that I should
               | get personally caught up in it.
        
               | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
               | >> If it was structured with a reasonable amount of
               | compute, and instead, time-accuracy gates were used for
               | prizes, it would be much more open. But people do not use
               | it because the game is rigged to begin with!
               | 
               | The entire benchmark is set up so as to try and make it
               | _artificially_ hard for deep learning: there are only
               | three examples for each task; AND the private test set
               | has a different distribution than the public training and
               | validation sets (from what I can tell; a violation of
               | PAC-Learning assumptions and then why should anyone be
               | surprised if machine learning approaches in general can't
               | deal with that?).
               | 
               | Even I (long story) find ARC to be unfair in the simplest
               | sense of the word: it does not make for a level playing
               | field that would allow for disparate approaches to
               | machine learning to be compared fairly. Strangely and
               | uniquely, the unfairness is aimed at the dominant
               | approach, deep learning, where every other benchmark
               | tends to skew towards deep learning (e.g. huge feature-
               | based, labelled data).
               | 
               | But why's that? If ARC-AGI is a true test of AGI, or
               | intelligence, or whatever it is supposed to be (an IQ
               | test for AIs) then why does it have to jump through hoops
               | just to defend itself from the dominant approach to AI?
               | If it's a good test for AI, and the dominant approach to
               | AI can't really do AI, then the dominant approach should
               | not be capable of passing the test, without any
               | shenanigans with reduced compute or few examples.
               | 
               | Is the purpose to demonstrate that deep neural nets can't
               | generalise from few examples? That's machine learning 101
               | (although I guess there's still those who missed the
               | lecture). Is it to encourage deep neural nets to get
               | better at generalising from few examples? Well, first
               | place just went to a big, deep, bad neural net with data
               | augmentation so that doesn't even work.
        
               | mrandish wrote:
               | Mike - please know that not everyone who appreciates ARC
               | feels the same way as the GP. I'm not an academic
               | researcher but I am quite sensitive to hype and excessive
               | marketing. I've never felt the ARC site was anything
               | other than appropriately professional.
               | 
               | Even revisiting it now, I don't see anything wrong with
               | being concisely clear and even a little provocative in
               | stating your case on your own site. Especially since a
               | key value of ARC is getting more objectively grounded
               | regarding progress toward AGI. On top of that ARC is "A
               | non-profit for the public advancement of open artificial
               | general intelligence" that you guys are personally
               | donating serious money and time to that's helping a field
               | where a lot of entrepreneurs are going to make money and
               | academics are going to advance their careers.
               | 
               | My perception is ARC tried it the other way for years but
               | a lot of academics and AI pundits ignored or dismissed it
               | without ever meaningfully engaging with it. "Sharpening"
               | the message this year has clearly paid off in bringing
               | attention that's shifted the conversation and is helping
               | advance progress toward AGI in ways nothing else has. I
               | also greatly appreciate the time and care you and
               | Francois have put into making the ARC proposition clear
               | enough for non-technical people to understand. That's
               | hard to do and doesn't happen by accident.
               | 
               | Personally, I've found ARC valuable in the real world
               | outside of academia and domain experts because it
               | provides a conceptually simple starting place to discuss
               | with non-technical people what the term AGI might even
               | mean. My high school-aged daughter asked me about vague
               | AGI impending doom scenarios she heard on TikTok. I had
               | her solve a couple ARC samples and then pointed out that
               | today's best AIs aren't yet close to doing the same. This
               | counter-intuitive revelation got her pondering the "Why?"
               | which led to a deep discussion about the multi-
               | dimensional breadth of human creativity and an
               | appreciation of the many ways artificial intelligences
               | might differ from human intelligence.
        
               | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
               | >> My perception is ARC tried it the other way for years
               | but a lot of academics and AI pundits ignored or
               | dismissed it without ever meaningfully engaging with it.
               | 
               | Your perception is very wrong and the likely reason is
               | that as you say you're not an academic researcher. ARC
               | made a huge splash with the original Kaggle competition a
               | few years ago and it drew in exactly the kind of
               | "academic researcher" you seem to be pointing to: those
               | in university research groups who do not have access to
               | the data and compute that the big tech companies have,
               | and who can consequently not compete in the usual big
               | data benchmarks that are dominated by Google, OpenAI,
               | Meta, and friends. ARC, with its (unfair) few-shot tasks
               | and constantly changing private test set, is exactly the
               | kind of dataset that that kind of researcher are looking
               | for, something that is relatively safe from big tech deep
               | neural nets. Even the $1 million prize seems specially
               | designed to be just enough to draw in that crowd of not
               | super-rich academics while leaving corporate research
               | groups insufficiently motivated.
               | 
               | Besides which, I won't name names but one of the
               | principal researchers in the winning system is just one
               | of those academics. I don't know which is the period you
               | mean ARC was ignored by the academic community but that
               | particular researcher was in a certain meeting of like-
               | minded academics two years ago where one of the main
               | areas of discussion was in short "how to beat ARC and
               | show that our stuff works".
        
               | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
               | >> Now that the AI research field is coming around to the
               | idea that something beyond deep learning is needed, the
               | story matters less, and the benchmark, and future
               | versions, can stand on their utility as a compass towards
               | AGI.
               | 
               | How so? All the three top systems are deep neural net
               | systems. The first place went to a system that, quoting
               | from the "contributions" section of the paper, employed:
               | 
               | >> An automated data generation methodology that starts
               | with 100-160 program solutions for ARC training tasks,
               | and expands them to make 400k new problems paired with
               | Python solutions
               | 
               | As I pointed out in another comment the top results in
               | ARC have been achieved by ordinary, deep-learning, big-
               | data, memorisation based approaches. You and fchollet (in
               | these comments) try to claim otherwise but I don't
               | understand why.
               | 
               | In fact, no, I understand why. I think fchollet wanted to
               | place ARC as "not just a benchmark", the opposite of what
               | tbalsam is asking for above. The motivation is solid: if
               | we've learned anything in the last twenty-thirty years is
               | that deep neural nets are very capable at beating
               | benchmarks. For any deep neural net model that beats a
               | benchmark though the question remains whether it can do
               | anything else besides. Unfortunately, that is not a
               | question that can be answered by beating yet another
               | benchmark.
               | 
               | And here we are now, and the first place in the current
               | ARC challenge goes to a deep neural net system trained on
               | a synthetically augmented dataset. The right thing to do
               | now would be to scale back the claims about the magickal
               | AGI-IQ test with unicorns, and accept that your benchmark
               | is just not any different than any other previous AI
               | benchmark, that it is not any more informative than any
               | other benchmark, and that a completely different kind of
               | test of artificial intelligence is needed.
               | 
               | There is after all such a thing as scientific integrity.
               | You make a big conjecture, you look at the data, realise
               | that you're wrong, accept it, and move on. For example
               | the authors of GLUE did that (as in SUPERGLUE). The
               | authors of the Winograd Schema Challenge did that. You
               | should follow their examples.
        
               | trott wrote:
               | > realise that you're wrong, accept it, and move on
               | 
               | What do you think about limiting the submission size?
               | Kaggle does this sometimes.
               | 
               | With a limit like 0.1-1MB (compressed), you are basically
               | saying: "Give me sample-efficient learning algorithms,
               | not pretrained models."
        
               | iwsk wrote:
               | we live in a society
        
         | trott wrote:
         | Mike and Francois,
         | 
         | Compute is limited during inference, and this naturally limits
         | brute-force program search.
         | 
         | But this doesn't prevent one from creating a huge ARC-like
         | dataset ahead of time, like BARC did (but bigger), and training
         | a correspondingly huge NN on it.
         | 
         | Placing a limit on the submission size could foil this kind of
         | brute-force approach though. I wonder if you are considering
         | this for 2025?
        
         | padswo1 wrote:
         | I don't think ARC has particularly advanced the research. The
         | approaches that are successful were developed elsewhere and
         | then applied to ARC. Happy to be shown somewhere this is not
         | the case.
         | 
         | In the case of TTT, I wouldn't really describe that as a 'new
         | AGI reasoning approach'. People have been fine tuning deep
         | learning models on specific tasks for a long time.
         | 
         | The fundamental instinct driving the creation of ARC - that
         | 'deep learning cannot do system 2 thinking', is under threat of
         | being proven wrong very soon. Attempts to define the approaches
         | that are working as somehow not 'traditional deep learning'
         | really seem like shifting the goal posts.
        
           | mikeknoop wrote:
           | Correct, fine-tuning is not new. It's long been used to
           | augment foundational LLMs with private data. Eg. private
           | enterprise data. We do this at Zapier, for instance.
           | 
           | The new and surprising thing about test-time training (TTT)
           | is how effective it is an approach to deal with novel
           | abstract reasoning problems like ARC-AGI.
           | 
           | TTT was pioneered by Jack Cole last year and popularized this
           | year by several teams, including this winning paper:
           | https://ekinakyurek.github.io/papers/ttt.pdf
        
             | p1esk wrote:
             | How is TTT anything other than a deep learning algorithm?
             | We have a deep learning model, we generate training data
             | based on an example and use a stochastic gradient descent
             | to update the model weights to improve its predictions
             | according to the training data. This is a classic DL
             | paradigm. I just don't see why would you consider this an
             | advancement if you your goal is to move "beyond" deep
             | learning.
        
       | celeritascelery wrote:
       | What surprises me about this is how poorly general-purpose LLMs
       | do. The best one is OpenAI o1-preview at 18%. This is
       | significantly worse than the purpose-built models like ARChitects
       | (which scored 53.5). This model used TTT to train on the ARC-AGI
       | task specification (amoung other things). It seems that even if
       | someone creates a model that can "solve" ARC, it still is not
       | indicative of AGI since it is not "general" anymore, it is just
       | specialized to this particular task. Similar to how chess engines
       | are not AGI, despite being superhuman at chess. It will be much
       | more convincing when general models not trained specifically for
       | ARC can still score well on it.
       | 
       | They do mention that some of the tasks here are susceptible to
       | brute force and they plan to address that in ARC-AGI-2.
       | 
       | > nearly half (49%) of the private evaluation set was solved by
       | at least one team during the original 2020 Kaggle competition all
       | of which were using some variant of brute-force program search.
       | This suggests a large fraction of ARC-AGI-1 tasks are susceptible
       | to this kind of method and does not carry much useful signal
       | towards general intelligence.
        
         | fchollet wrote:
         | It is correct that the first model that will beat ARC-AGI will
         | only be able to handle ARC-AGI tasks. However, the idea is that
         | the _architecture_ of that model should be able to be
         | repurposed to arbitrary problems. That is what makes ARC-AGI a
         | good compass towards AGI (unlike chess).
         | 
         | For instance, current top models use TTT, which is a completely
         | general-purpose technique that provides the most significant
         | boost to DL model's generalization power in recent memory.
         | 
         | The other category of approach that is working well is program
         | synthesis -- if pushed to the extent that it could solve ARC-
         | AGI, the same system could be redeployed to solve arbitrary
         | programming tasks, as well as tasks isomorphic to programming
         | (such as theorem proving).
        
           | scoobertdoobert wrote:
           | Francois, have you coded and tested a solution yourself that
           | you think will work best?
        
             | optimalsolver wrote:
             | Hey, he's the visionary. You come up with the nuts and
             | bolts.
        
               | homarp wrote:
               | is keras nuts and bolts enough?
        
         | mrandish wrote:
         | > It seems that even if someone creates a model that can
         | "solve" ARC, it still is not indicative of AGI since it is not
         | "general" anymore
         | 
         | I recently explained why I like ARC to a non-technical friend
         | this way: "When an AI solves ARC it won't be proof of AGI. It's
         | the opposite. As long as ARC remains unsolved I'm confident
         | we're not even close to AGI."
         | 
         | For the sake of being provocative, I'd even argue that ARC
         | remaining unsolved is a sign we're not yet making meaningful
         | progress in the right direction. AGI is the top of Everest. ARC
         | is base camp.
        
           | iwsk wrote:
           | in other words, solving ARC is necessary but not sufficient
           | for AGI
        
             | mrandish wrote:
             | Yes! That's the exact phrase I would have used with someone
             | on HN. But that doesn't describe my non-technical friend.
             | :-)
        
             | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
             | Why is it necessary? Could a spider solve ARC-AGI, or could
             | a pigeon, or a cat? And if an animal doesn't need to solve
             | ARC-AGI to be intelligent, then why does an AGI?
        
         | thomasahle wrote:
         | > What surprises me about this is how poorly general-purpose
         | LLMs do. The best one is OpenAI o1-preview at 18%.
         | 
         | o1-preview doesn't even have image input, so I wonder how they
         | used it.
         | 
         | Also, Ryan Greenblatts solution basically does "best of 4000"
         | iirc. Presumably o1-preview was single shot.
        
           | celeritascelery wrote:
           | None of the models use images, they all operate and a json
           | format the describes the input squares.
        
       | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
       | The first question I still have is what happened to core
       | knowledge priors. The white paper that introduced ARC made a big
       | todo about how core knowledge priors are necessary to solve ARC
       | tasks but from what I can tell none of the best-performing (or
       | at-all performing) systems have anything to do with core knowlege
       | priors.
       | 
       | So what happened to that assumption? Is it dead?
       | 
       | The second question I still have is about the defenses of ARC
       | against memorisation-based, big-data approaches. I note that the
       | second best system is based on an LLM with "test time training"
       | where the first two steps are:                 initial finetuning
       | on similar tasks        auxiliary task format and augmentations
       | 
       | Which is to say, a data augmentation approach. With big data
       | comes great responsibility and the authors of the second-best
       | system don't disappoint: they claim that by training on more
       | examples they achieve reasoning.
       | 
       | So what happened to the claim that ARC is secure against big-data
       | approaches? Is it dead?
        
         | fchollet wrote:
         | What all top models do is recombine at test time the knowledge
         | they already have. So they all possess Core Knowledge priors.
         | Techniques to acquire them vary:
         | 
         | * Use a pretrained LLM and hope that relevant programs will be
         | memorized via exposure to text data (this doesn't work that
         | well)
         | 
         | * Pretrain a LLM on ARC-AGI-like data
         | 
         | * Hardcode the priors into a DSL
         | 
         | > Which is to say, a data augmentation approach
         | 
         | The key bit isn't the data augmentation but the TTT. TTT is a
         | way to lift the #1 issue with DL models: that they cannot
         | recombine their knowledge at test time to adapt to something
         | they haven't seen before (strong generalization). You can argue
         | whether TTT is the right way to achieve this, but there is no
         | doubt that TTT is a major advance in this direction.
         | 
         | The top ARC-AGI models perform well not because they're trained
         | on tons of data, but because they can adapt to novelty at test
         | time (usually via TTT). For instance, if you drop the TTT
         | component you will see that these large models trained on
         | millions of synthetic ARC-AGI tasks drop to <10% accuracy. This
         | demonstrates empirically that ARC-AGI cannot be solved purely
         | via memorization and interpolation.
        
           | optimalsolver wrote:
           | >This demonstrates empirically that ARC-AGI cannot be solved
           | purely via memorization and interpolation
           | 
           | Now that the current challenge is over, and a successor
           | dataset is in the works, can we see how well the leading LLMs
           | perform against the private test set?
        
             | tuukkah wrote:
             | I think the "semi-private" numbers here already measure
             | that: https://arcprize.org/2024-results
             | 
             | For example, Claude 3.5 gets 14% in semi-private eval vs
             | 21% in public eval. I remember reading an explanation of
             | "semi-private" earlier but cannot find it now.
        
           | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
           | >> So they all possess Core Knowledge priors.
           | 
           | Do you mean the ones from your white paper? The same ones
           | that humans possess? How do you know this?
           | 
           | >> The key bit isn't the data augmentation but the TTT.
           | 
           | I haven't had the chance to read the papers carefully. Have
           | they done ablation studies? For instance, is the following a
           | guess or is it an empirical result?
           | 
           | >> For instance, if you drop the TTT component you will see
           | that these large models trained on millions of synthetic ARC-
           | AGI tasks drop to <10% accuracy.
        
         | aithrowawaycomm wrote:
         | Even the strongest possible interpretation of the results
         | wouldn't conclude "ARC-AGI is dead" because none of the
         | submissions came especially close to human-level performance;
         | the criteria was 85% success but the best in 2024 was 55%.
         | 
         | That said, I think there should be consideration via
         | information thermodynamics: even with TTT these program-
         | generating systems are using an enormous amount of bits
         | compared to a human mind, a tiny portion of which solves ARC
         | quickly and easily using causality-first principles of
         | reasoning.
         | 
         | Another point: suppose a system solves ARC-AGI with 99%
         | accuracy. Then it should be tested on "HARC-HAGI," a variant
         | that uses hexagons instead of squares. This likely wouldn't
         | trip up a human very much - perhaps a small decrease due to
         | increased surface area for brain farts. But if the AI needs to
         | be retrained on a ton of hexagonal examples, then that AI can't
         | be an AGI candidate.
        
           | szvsw wrote:
           | > That said, I think there should be consideration via
           | information thermodynamics: even with TTT these program-
           | generating systems are using an enormous amount of bits
           | compared to a human mind, a tiny portion of which solves ARC
           | quickly and easily using causality-first principles of
           | reasoning.
           | 
           | This isn't my area of expertise, but it seems plausible to me
           | that what you said is completely erroneous or at the very
           | least completely unverifiable at this point in time. How do
           | you quantify how many bits it takes a human mind to solve one
           | of the ARC problems?
           | 
           | That seems likely beyond the level of insight we have into
           | the structure of cognition and information storage etc etc in
           | wetware. I could of course be wrong and would love to be
           | corrected if so! You mentioned a "tiny portion" of the human
           | mind, but (as far as I'm aware), any given "small" part of
           | human cognition still involves huge amounts of complexity and
           | compute.
           | 
           | Maybe you are saying that the high level decision making a
           | human goes through when solving can be represented with a
           | relatively small number of pieces of information/logical
           | operations (as opposed to a much lower level notion closer to
           | the wetware of the quantity of information) but then it seems
           | unfair to compare to the low level equivalent (weights &
           | biases, FLOPs etc) in the ML system when there may be higher
           | order equivalents.
           | 
           | I do appreciate the general notion of wanting to normalize
           | against _something_ though, and some notion of information
           | seems like a reasonable choice, but practically out of our
           | reach. Maybe something like peak power or total energy
           | consumption would be a more reasonable choice, which we can
           | at least get a lower and upper bounds on in the human case
           | (metabolic rates are pretty well studied, and even if we
           | don't have a good idea of how much energy is involved in
           | completing cognitive tasks we can at least get bounds for
           | running the entire system in that period of time) and close
           | to a precise value in the ML case.
        
             | aithrowawaycomm wrote:
             | I was speaking loosely but the operative term is
             | "information thermodynamics": comparing bits of AI output
             | versus bits of _intentional_ human thought, ignoring
             | statistical /physical bits related to ANN inference or
             | biological neuron activity. The "tiny chunk of the human
             | mind" thing was a distraction I shouldn't have included.
             | 
             | These AI output as tokens hundreds of potential solutions,
             | whereas a human solving a very tricky ARC problem might
             | need at most a few dozen cases to run through. There's a
             | big mess of ANN linear algebra / human subconscious thought
             | and I agree these messes can't be compared (or even
             | identified in the human case). But we can compare the
             | efficiency of the solution. It is possible that
             | subconsciously humans "generate" hundreds of solutions that
             | are mostly discarded, but I don't think the brain is fast
             | enough to do that at the speed of conscious thought: it's a
             | 50bn core processor but each core is only 200Hz and they
             | aren't general-purpose CPUs. It also seems inconsistent
             | with how humans solve these problems.
             | 
             | I believe energy usage would be even more misleading: in
             | terms of operations/second a human brain is comparable to a
             | 2020s supercomputer running at 30MW, but it only consumes
             | 300 watts. (I was thinking about this with the "tiny
             | portion" comment but it is irrelevant.)
        
               | szvsw wrote:
               | Thanks for the response! I was trying to allude to what
               | you are describing with the bit (ha) I mentioned about
               | higher order thinking but you obviously articulated it
               | much more effectively.
               | 
               | I guess I'm not sure it's obvious where the right line to
               | draw the boundary for "intentional human thought" is?
               | Surely there is a lot of cognition and representation
               | going on at extraordinary speeds that exist in some hazy
               | border region between instinct/reflex/subconscious and
               | conscious thought. Still, having said that, I do see what
               | you are saying about trying to compare the complexity of
               | the formal path to the solution, or at least what the
               | human thinks their formal path was.
               | 
               | I'm generally of the mind (also, ha) that we won't really
               | ever be able to quantify any of this in a meaningful way
               | in the short term and if anything which qualifies as AGI
               | does emerge, it might only be something which is an "I
               | know it when I see it" kind of evaluation...
               | 
               | Where are you getting 300W from? The body only dumps 100W
               | of heat at rest and uses like 300-400W during moderate
               | physical activity, so I'm a little confused about what
               | you are describing there. The typical estimates I've seen
               | are like 20W or so for the brain.
               | 
               | Edit: I should also say that what you describe does seem
               | like a great way to compare solutions between
               | computational systems currently being developed and a
               | good one to use to try to push development forward; it
               | just seems quixotic to try to be able to use it
               | comparatively with human cognition or to be able to
               | meaningfully use it to define where AGI is, which might
               | not be what you were advocating for at all, in which
               | case, sorry for misinterpreting!
        
       | hulium wrote:
       | Were there any interesting non-neural approaches? I was wondering
       | whether there is any underlying structure in the ARC tasks that
       | could tell us something about algorithms for "reasoning" problems
       | in general.
        
         | neoneye2 wrote:
         | The 3rd place solution by Agnis Liukis, solves 40 tasks.
         | https://www.kaggle.com/code/gregkamradt/arc-prize-2024-solut...
        
       | a_wild_dandan wrote:
       | Reasons that I can't take this benchmark seriously:
       | 
       | 1. Existing brute force algorithms solve 40% of this "reasoning"
       | and "generalization" test.
       | 
       | 2. AGI must evidently fit on a single 16GB, decade-old GPU?
       | 
       | 3. If ARC fails blind people, it's not a reasoning test.
       | Reasoning is independent of visual acuity. So ARC is at best a
       | vision processing _then_ reasoning test. SotA model  "failure" is
       | meaningless. ("But what about the other format, JSON?" Yeah, I
       | would _love_ to see the human solve rate on that...)
        
         | pshirshov wrote:
         | Ergh. This test checks how good you can infer cellular
         | automaton rules. Considering that CAs are Turing-complete, that
         | might be a very good entry-level intelligence detector.
         | 
         | If it's so easy to brute force, why wouldn't you claim the $1M?
        
       | nnx wrote:
       | I'm unable to figure out how to solve current Daily Puzzle
       | (Puzzle ID: 79369cc6) at https://arcprize.org/play
       | 
       | Either I'm really dumb or the test is getting into captcha-like
       | territory where humans aren't really good at solving/deciphering
       | the test anymore.
        
         | atc0m wrote:
         | I agree some of the tests are not intuitive.
        
         | trott wrote:
         | (Spoiler alert)
         | 
         | In https://arcprize.org/play?task=79369cc6 , the yellow 3x3
         | square shows you the pink pattern to look for, while allowing
         | rotations (and ignoring the fact that the pattern may be next
         | to other patterns)
        
       | jebarker wrote:
       | I'm a little surprised by the seeming enthusiasm in the report
       | for TTT as an approach. The results speak for themselves and TTT
       | seems like a powerful approach. But the dependence on large
       | amounts of synthetic pre-training data seems to contradict the
       | philosophical ideas behind the competition.
        
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