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Re:Pythagorean Theorem Found on Clay Tablet 1k Years Older T... by sn41 on Thursday October 05, 2023 @01:02AM (#37775070)
Proofs are of course the gold standard. But even if others discovered the rule, their contribution should not be held to be trivial.

A modern analogy: today, people are very happy to use LLMs and Transformers without anyone "proving" that they work. Right now, philosophically, they are at the level of empirical observations (perhaps not even that). Does that mean that today's AI researchers should get no credit when at a later date? I am not sure. Empirical discovery of a rule is also no trivial thing.

Re:Pythagorean Theorem Found on Clay Tablet 1k Years Older T... by saithound on Thursday October 05, 2023 @01:30AM (#37775193)
Yes, when people in the 4000s write clickbait holonet articles about how the Master Theorem of Neural Network Scaling was not actually invented by the Muskovites of Mars, but was found written on an Ancient American tablet containing the works of Hoffmann et al., I hope somebody will offer substantial corrections.

That's not in any sense a value judgment of the empirical work done at DeepMind. Nor does it dtop anybody from writing a better article which explains tha the Babylonians (and many others) used the empirical observations underlying the theorem, while explaining that this did not constitute mathematical proof.

Re:Pythagorean Theorem Found on Clay Tablet 1k Years Older T... by outrun86 on Thursday October 05, 2023 @02:17AM (#37775423)
Found on an ancient tablet as the work of Schmidhuber et al. but ok
Re:Pythagorean Theorem Found on Clay Tablet 1k Years Older T... by Turing_Machine on Thursday October 05, 2023 @01:08AM (#37775097)
Pointing out that it's not a theorem doesn't mean it's been trivialized.

If there's no proof, it's not a theorem, by definition. That doesn't make empirical observations worthless -- far from it!