Because I can solve problems that would take the age of the universe to brute force, without waiting the age of the universe. So can you: start counting at 1, increment the counter up to 10^8000, then print the counter value.

Prolog: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ...

You and me instantly: 10^8000

There's a whole lot of undecidable (or effectively undecidable) edge cases that can be adequately covered. As a matter of fact, Decidability Logic is compatible with Prolog.

The brain can still use other means of working in addition to brute forcing solutions. For example, how would you go about solving the chess puzzle of eight queens that doesn't involve going through the potential positions and then filtering out the options that don't match the criteria for the solution?

Prolog can also evaluate mathematical expressions directly as well.

Can you try calculating 101 * 70 in your head?

Very easy to solve, just like it is easy to solve many other ones once you know the tricks.

I recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Mental-Math-Mathemagicians-Ca...

Completely missing the point on purpose?

Elaborate.

you don’t solve it by brute forcing possible solutions until one sticks

Yeah, read it in another comment. Why do you think doing calculations in your head is brute-forcing? Many people can do it flawlessly, without even knowing of these "tricks". They just know. Is that brute-force? I would not say so.

YOU DON’T SOLVE MATH VIA BRUTE FORCE!

THAT’S THE POINT!

You are not replying to what I said. I am not going to repeat myself, see the parent comment you replied to.

Your original comment completely missed the point of what it was replying to, you phrased it like you were correcting them but you were actually in agreement and didn't seem to realize it. They tried to clarify when you asked and when you responded you assumed they had the opposite viewpoint from what they actually have.

I replied to "Can you try calculating 101 * 70 in your head?".

Yes, many people can successfully calculate it through learned tricks or no learned tricks.

That is all I am saying. And my question is: how is calculating it in your own head brute-force, especially if done without such tricks?

No need to complicate it, answers to my question would suffice.

> how is calculating it in your own head brute-force

Doing this calculation in your head is not brute force, which was their entire point. Their math question was an example of why the brain isn't brute-forcing solutions, replying to this:

> What makes you think your brain isn't also brute forcing potential solutions subconciously and only surfacing the useful results?

And I posted a link to a book that helps with mental math. Does it make it brute force if I know some mental math tricks?

In any case, I am not sure why he kept on telling me that you do not solve it through brute-force because that is not what I said.

I think therefore I am calculator?

Um, that's really easy to do in your head, there's no carrying or anything? 7,070

7 * 101 = 707 * 10 = 7,070

And computers don't brute-force multiplication either, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to the comment above?

I think it is very relevant, because no brute-forcing is involved in this solution.

That's not true, the 'brute force' part is searching for a shortcut that works.

The brute force got reduced down to fast heuristics, like Arthur Benjamin's Mathemagics.

It’s almost like you’re proving the point of his reply…

I can absolutely try this. Doesn't mean i'll solve it. If i solve it there's no guarantee i'll be correct. Math gets way harder when i don't have a legitimate need to do it. This falls in the "no legit need" so my mind went right to "100 * 70, good enough."

Or you could do (100 + 1)*70 => 100*70 + 1*70

human brains are insanely powerful pattern matching and shortcut-taking machines. There's very little brute forcing going on.

Your second sentence contradicts your first.

Pray tell how it contradicts the first.

Just note: human pattern matching is not Haskell/Erlang/ML pattern matching. It doesn't go [1] through all possible matches of every possible combination of all available criteria

[1] If it does, it's the most powerful computing device imaginable.

> [1] If it does, it's the most powerful computing device imaginable.

Well, my brain perhaps. Not sure about the rest of y'all.

I 100% agree with nutjob :|

There are hundreds of trillions of synapses in the brain, and much of what they do (IANANS) could reasonably be described as pattern matching: mostly sitting idle waiting for patterns. (Since dendritic trees perform a lot of computation (for example, combining inputs at each branch), if you want to count the number of pattern matchers in the branch you can't just count neurons. A neuron can recognise more than one pattern.)

So yes, thanks to its insanely parallel architecture, the brain is also an insanely brute force pattern matcher, constantly matching against who knows how many trillions of previously seen patterns. (BTW IMHO this is why LLMs work so well)

(I do recognise the gap in my argument: are all those neurons actually receiving inputs to match against, or are they 'gated'? But we're really just arguing about semantics of applying "brute force", a CS term, to a neural architecture, where it has no definition.)

Just intuition ;)