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A comment on The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging from Large AI Models. Parent comment

Re:The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging from Large AI Models by shrikant on Friday March 17, 2023 @12:52PM (#35199631)
When I was a bored and under-challenged student in the early days of university, one of my tests during a programming exam was to write a program that spit out the factorial of an input integer.

For shits and giggles, I just just wrote a series of `if...then` statements for 0 to 5, and only actually calculated the factorial for inputs >=6. I passed after the examiner just input 3 and 5 and was satisfied that the output was correct. Oops.

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Re:The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging from Large AI Models by WalterBright on Friday March 17, 2023 @01:02PM (#35199802)
Doing a table lookup for common cases and computing for the less common ones is perfectly valid!
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Re:The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging from Large AI Models by Jeff_Brown on Friday March 17, 2023 @01:26PM (#35200103)
And for some problems it's even efficient. Not factorial, though.
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Re:The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging from Large AI Models by Jeff_Brown on Friday March 17, 2023 @05:30PM (#35203173)
Oh you're right, hive mind, it's efficient. Sorry.
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Re:The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging from Large AI Models by dxbydt on Friday March 17, 2023 @01:48PM (#35200372)
Not 100% sure but I believe this is how we landed the lunar module on the moon the first time...tan/arctan/both were too hard to compute on the processors of those days so they discretized into half angles & stored the tangents in a lookup table.
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Re:The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging from Large AI Models by hgsgm on Friday March 17, 2023 @04:56PM (#35202795)
That's how early calculators worked, and some fast math libraries today too.
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Re:The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging from Large AI Models by speed_spread on Friday March 17, 2023 @09:12PM (#35205017)
The Pentium FDIV bug was due to a bad value in a lookup table.
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Re:The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging from Large AI Models by thaw13579 on Friday March 17, 2023 @02:00PM (#35200544)
This is the way. Next, you could cache those values for >=6 when you compute them and also use the previously cached values for sub-problem solutions.
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