No. This is a fundamentally erroneous analogy. We don't generate code by a stochastic process.

You don't? I do.

A few days ago I lost some data including recent code changes. Today I'm trying to recreate the same code changes - i.e. work I've just recently worked through - and for the life of me I can't get it to work the same way again. Even though "just" that is what I set out to do in the first place - no improvements, just to do the same thing over again.

We don't understand how human minds work anywhere close to well enough to say this.

Everything we do is a stochastic process. If you throw a dart 100 times at a target, it's not going to land at the same spot every time. There is a great deal of uncertainty and non-deterministic behavior in our everyday actions.

> throw a dart ... great deal of uncertainty and nongdeterministic behavior in our everyday actions.

Throwing a dart could not be further away from programming a computer. It's one of the most deterministic things we can do. If I write if(n>0) then the computer will execute my intent with 100% accuracy. It won't compare n to 0.005.

You see arguments like yours a lot. It seems to be a way of saying "let's lower the bar for AI". But suppose I have a laser guided rifle that I rely on for my food and someone comes along with a bow and arrow and says "give it a chance, after all lots of things we do are inaccurate, like throwing darts for example". What would you answer?

As much as it’s true that there’s stochasticity involved in just about everything that we do, I’m not sure that that’s equivalent to everything we do being a stochastic process. With your dart example, a very significant amount of the stochasticity involved in the determination of where the dart lands is external to the human thrower. An expert human thrower could easily make it appear deterministic.

Go say this to a darts player who has hit a 9 darter…..

Actually no wait let’s expand it. Why not go say this to Ronnie O’Sullivan too!

The way you’re describing is such that there is no determinism behind what is being done. Simply not true.

If we are talking in terms of IRL/physics, there is no such thing as a deterministic system outside of theory - everything is stochastic to differing degrees - including you brain that came up with these thoughts.

Theres nothing stochastic about a human that hits a 147 mate nor a 9 darter mate. I cant believe people seriously post this nonsense.

I think that both of you are right to some extent.

It’s undeniable that humans exhibit stochastic traits, but we’re obviously not stochastic processes in the same sense as LLMs and the like. We have agency, error-correction, and learning mechanisms that make us far more reliable.

In practice, humans (especially experts) have an apparent determinism despite all of the randomness involved (both internally and externally) in many of our actions.

I have a strong suspicion that the world is not as deterministic as you'd like it to be.

Or it is deterministic, but infinitely complex, so that also leaves us only with stochastic.

stochastic vs deterministic is arguable a property of modelling, not reality.

Something so complex that we cannot model it as deterministic is hence stochastic. We can just as easily model a stochastic thing by ignoring the stochastic parts.

separating subjective appearance of things from how we can conceptualise them as models begs a deeper philosophical question of how you can talk about the nature of things you cannot perceive.

I remember one of my ex-bosses in 2015 telling us basically he was doing "intuitive programming" instead of rational. Worked quite well.

Not interested in joining a pile-on, but I just wanted to point out how difficult reproducible builds are. I think there's still a bit of unpredictability in there, unless we go to extraordinary lengths (see also: software proofs).