On: Can Neural Networks Crack Sudoku?

[jcoffland]

> The point isn't "can we solve sudoku with a completely over-wrought solution", it's "can NN be applied to X class of problems with no human-added domain specific knowledge"

But why would you care about solving a class of problems with NNs when that class of problems already has much better solutions? Too many new programmers are running to NNs out of pure laziness. NNs are like magic. They solve the problem for you so you don't have to learn how to solve it yourself. Or at least that's the enticing promise.

[namuol → jcoffland]

> why would you care about solving a class of problems with NNs when that class of problems already has much better solutions?

> NNs are like magic. They solve the problem for you so you don't have to learn how to solve it yourself.

Sounds like you answered your own question; am I missing something?

[jcoffland → namuol]

The part you are missing is that the magic is illusory.

[bonzini → jcoffland]

And especially when humans don't use intuition to solve it, but basically an inefficient version of the same algorithms that are used by computers.