[HN Gopher] AI/Math Puzzle
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AI/Math Puzzle
Author : markerz
Score : 43 points
Date : 2025-03-31 19:41 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (aggressivelyparaphrasing.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (aggressivelyparaphrasing.me)
| albert_e wrote:
| Haven't read past the problem statement to avoid spoilers.
|
| How difficult can it be to brute force this. (Try all possible
| domain names within a reasonable length)
|
| Take help from AI while you are at it.
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| I think you might need api access to a nameserver to take that
| approach. because if you just throw 100,000,000 dns lookups at
| your default server they are going to throttle you.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Depending on what you understand by the term "prefix" you can
| dramatically shrink the search space without doing any
| thinking.
| quuxplusone wrote:
| As I understand it, yeah, there's a way to _ask_ the .ai
| nameserver for its entire "zone" (the mapping from domain
| names to... everything else). That's a "zone transfer" a.k.a.
| "AXFR" request, which you can make by first locating a
| nameserver that knows about .ai: $ dig NS
| ai.
|
| Now you have the names of .ai's nameservers, and the glue
| records for some of them: ;; ADDITIONAL
| SECTION: v0n3.nic.ai. 107 IN A 199.115.155.1
| v0n3.nic.ai. 107 IN AAAA 2001:500:a3::1 v0n0.nic.ai.
| 7 IN A 199.115.152.1
|
| Now you ask that nameserver for a zone transfer:
| $ dig AXFR ai. @199.115.155.1
|
| ...And it quickly says "no, not to you; I don't know you and
| so I'm not going to spend the bandwidth to tell you all
| that." ; <<>> DiG
| 9.18.30-0ubuntu0.22.04.2-Ubuntu <<>> AXFR ai. @199.115.155.1
| ;; global options: +cmd ; Transfer failed.
|
| But hey, that's how you'd _ask_. Now, if you _were_ on the
| nameserver 's whitelist, you'd see the whole zone, and the
| answer to the blog's puzzle would be somewhere in there. (But
| note that the answer is also at the end of TFA; you don't
| have to solve it yourself if you don't want to.)
|
| I wouldn't use the words "API access" to describe "permission
| to make AXFR requests," but yeah, it's the same general idea:
| if you're not on the list, you can't do the thing.
|
| More than I care to know about AXFR:
| https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/axfr-notes.html
| tux3 wrote:
| You can usually also ask ICANN's CZDS service for a
| particular zone file, if you can give them a valid reason.
| But in this case, they don't seem to have the ai tld.
| vessenes wrote:
| I think that "prefix" properly interpreted makes this a small
| search set.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| log* is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterated_logarithm
|
| aka inverse of tetration
| guy234 wrote:
| this problem does not look remotely interesting
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Yep. Just some mechanical calculation.
| esomod wrote:
| o3-mini solved it
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67ee9b1c-57d4-8005-b7ec-16fceab1ff...
| esomod wrote:
| o1-pro also solves it
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67ee9bc0-2804-8005-85c3-2978e7a8ba...
| lqet wrote:
| Looking at this, I do not understand how people can be bearish
| about LLMs.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Because it is reassuring.
| bl0rg wrote:
| It is and it isn't. I've gotten so used to the promise of
| AI that I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back to
| imagining a "normal" future again. Of course it can all
| turn to fuck, but it's so much more interesting than dying
| at 85 in some home.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| Because this is just simple substitution of common math/CS
| functions.
| riku_iki wrote:
| One concern is that coding/logical puzzles are verticals
| where LLMs have lots of training data, they require small
| context window, and that's why they are doing well, but they
| don't necessary scale/generalize on other topics. For example
| I yet to see agents which would grab say Postgres codebase
| from github, and add untrivial features, send patch which is
| accepted.
| hansvm wrote:
| I think the usual bearish sentiment comes from:
|
| 1. The marketing (even "research" papers) vastly overstates
| these systems' capabilities
|
| 2. We've observed unacceptable failure rates for the majority
| of useful tasks
|
| 3. Despite a bunch of money being poured into it, failure
| rates are decreasing slowly even with exponentially more
| training and inference resources, and there are precious few
| tasks where we've arrived at an alternative reframing making
| those errors tolerable
|
| 4. The capabilities are increasing slowly, and it's not
| obvious that pouring resources into the problem will lead to
| the phase shift necessary to either overcome (3) and (4) or
| to generate some novel application that makes it all worth it
|
| Almost every attempted application I've seen has "worked" by
| using the AI to push externalities to other parties. It
| hasn't actually made the composite system meaningfully more
| efficient, with notable exceptions (e.g., the chat interface,
| once you learn the tool, if you use it correctly, can
| meaningfully improve certain kinds of productivity).
|
| Plus, for people who actually work in AI, the current
| approach is obviously wrong. There are roughly two sorts of
| architectures in use for variable-width data: recurrent
| networks which store everything and process everything (e.g.,
| transformers), and recurrent networks which compress
| everything and process the entire compressed space (e.g.,
| mamba), with a special mention for compression-based
| architectures which have a large enough state space that
| compression is unnecessary, and another special mention for
| slight variations yielding constant speedups like MoE. The
| problem with all of those ideas is that you're necessarily
| trading off accuracy for compute. To have sufficient accuracy
| on arbitrary problems, you _must_ store everything, and you
| _cannot_ meaningfully compress it. The thing that isn't
| necessarily required though is processing everything at every
| iteration (a direction MoE works toward), and past a certain
| scale, unless we get vastly more efficient chips in a hurry
| (even if we do, depending on the target application), it's
| obvious that you need a new architecture to build around.
|
| And so on. I work in AI (old-school ML for $WORK, new-school
| at home). I'm more bullish than a lot of people, especially
| since I see a direct cause and effect in things that make the
| business and my life better, but I'm still skeptical of the
| current craze. At a minimum, it's one of the most wasteful
| ways we could possibly do this research, and society isn't
| yet in a good place for the meager results we're getting.
| New-school AI is, currently, a net-negative to society, and I
| don't see that changing in the next several years.
| munchler wrote:
| It's an ad for a search engine.
| tasoeur wrote:
| exa.ai/givemeprize
| timerol wrote:
| I solved this in the worst way. Took a (correct) guess at what
| was meant by prefix, and then brute-forced a dozen of them. Did
| you know that zetta.ai is also an AI company?
| markerz wrote:
| All roads lead to Rome right?
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