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Re:The Alien Space of Science by in-silico on Friday October 23, 2026 @04:39PM (#50215014)
LLMs assign non-zero probability to every output (unless you you sampling modifiers like top-k), so if you sampled enough times the model would definitely come up with velcro. It's the same as the proverbial monkey with a typewriter.

The real question is whether it would happen in a practical timeframe.

Re:The Alien Space of Science by jjk166 on Friday October 23, 2026 @10:00PM (#50217728)
> The real question is whether it would happen in a practical timeframe.

How are we defining a practical timeframe? How many billions of man-years did it take for a human to come up with velcro? In a world without velcro I could easily imagine an llm proposing the idea long before a pure human team.