Comment by recursive

Yes, I mean exactly this type of insight. Basically taking a digital photo with a camera technically also just picks out the "address" of your current environment within the space of all images. Any 4K 2-hour-length feature film in a digital format is also just an address in the space of all possible videos. The director, the actors, the whole crew did all that work in order to select that point from the space of possibilities, they didn't "create" anything. That movie already existed.

Of course this is silly, but interesting nonetheless. And we routinely speak about such high-dimensional spaces in research and engineering. Or we can imagine optimization as traversing a pre-existing search space. It may be structured as a graph or perhaps a Euclidean space. And in that space we can imagine a loss surface, that sits there in peace all along, with its global minimum somewhere. And instead of "constructing" a solution, we are simply hiking in this space and trying to spot that valley. But this is a bit fictional. We never physically "instantiate" this surface. It's an imagined abstraction. In reality we just have a vector and some rules as to how we change that vector. But we can imagine those changes to be movements in an imagined space.

It's like the idea that the sculptor doesn't create the sculpture, the sculpture was there all along, he just had to remove the superfluous matter to reveal what was already there (i.e. the atoms belonging to the final sculpture).

The most interesting thing is kind of on the border, between these absurdly large spaces and the more manageable ones that are feasible to enumerate.

Another similar mindblow thing was when I forgot the password to a file that I encrypted. It's a fascinating thing that the bit pattern on the disk is functionally random now, and cracking it would take longer than the age of the universe. But if only I knew the password, it would only take just a second. There is a definite sequence of keystrokes I can execute to bring the universe in a state where the content will appear on my screen, it's so close, yet it's so-so far if you don't remember the password. Just a little difference in your brain state and it flips from trivial to hopeless.

PS, if you like thinking about such things, I recommend Meta-Math by Gregory Chaitin, it's very fun (providing an address VS constructing the thing is basically the gist of algorithmic information theory).

How to find a nice SHA1 hash? How do keyword search in this list? Search and discovery of quality are unsolved scientific challenges. Fascinating stuff.

At our university lab we've been working on this for 25 years. Building a search engine is the easy part. Keeping a federated server with a billion users running is unsolved. Creating a fully -serverless- decentralised search engine is possible, you also need self-funding economy. Seems we're one of the few labs worldwide to still make actual operational prototypes of this stuff. More shameless self promotion:

"SwarmSearch: Decentralized Search Engine with Self-Funding Economy" [0]

Really handy to have s search engine to search this webpage with 45,671,926,166,590,716,193,865,151,022,383,844,364,247,891,968 pages and the rest of the web (no spyware, no tracking).

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07452

I admit thinking this way is tempting, but in your model the number represents some kind of language, whether human-readable or machine-readable. If we accept the number is a non-lossy encoding of some language, we reach an equivalency stating there is no creating, just discovering language "through convoluted mental and technological processes". But can we really equate language and knowledge? I believe Gödel proved that we cannot, in the sense that there is no "perfect" way to encode knowledge in a system of consistent axioms. Ergo, no matter how eloquently you describe your invention of "the wheel", it is by its nature incomplete and imperfect. Some part of the knowledge will always be tacit.

This conflates mathematical existence with actual instantiation. A 2gb integer might be definable, but until someone encodes a particular arrangement of bits and gives it context, it doesn’t exist in any practical sense. We don’t treat all future novels as "already written" just because their ASCII codes can be mapped to integers.

I would say that that’s a valid _model_ we can use to describe creation, much like how maths is a model we use to describe the universe. However, whether maths IS the universe or creation IS discovery are more of a philosophical question, possibly an unanswerable one, that people will have many varying opinions on.

And that’s without me asking you to define “real”, which would be another rabbit hole.