Ok, i apologize if i have misjudged your intentions, that you weren't trying to insult me. I went a little overboard there, i'm sure your friends and you are competent people deserving of your statuses.
Yes, you are correct, I have come to a viewpoint that all problems can be solved by throwing enough computers and data at it. This was informed by arguments in ai. See for example, jurgen schmidhuber's website, or genetic programming at john koza's website.
I agree, many problems are in a sense "easy", and human's can solve them. However, my belief is that those are the problems that have already been solved. The difficult problems, the ones that have not yet been solved, might well be too difficult for humans to comprehend. Computation is cheap enough now that it should be the default first step to try to brute force a solution. Even in high school, teach students how to describe problems as an optimization. Don't bother teaching them equation solving. Analytical solutions are sometimes needed, let that be a specialization for advanced undergraduates or even graduate school.
This is kind of like the reductionism vs non-reductionism argument. In physics simple laws were discovered, however, in biology this will not be possible.
Yes, you are correct, I have come to a viewpoint that all problems can be solved by throwing enough computers and data at it. This was informed by arguments in ai. See for example, jurgen schmidhuber's website, or genetic programming at john koza's website.
I agree, many problems are in a sense "easy", and human's can solve them. However, my belief is that those are the problems that have already been solved. The difficult problems, the ones that have not yet been solved, might well be too difficult for humans to comprehend. Computation is cheap enough now that it should be the default first step to try to brute force a solution. Even in high school, teach students how to describe problems as an optimization. Don't bother teaching them equation solving. Analytical solutions are sometimes needed, let that be a specialization for advanced undergraduates or even graduate school.
This is kind of like the reductionism vs non-reductionism argument. In physics simple laws were discovered, however, in biology this will not be possible.