"What's General-Purpose Search, And Why Might We Expect To See It In Trained ML Systems?" by John Wentworth

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6mysMAqvo9giHC4iX/what-s-general-purpose-search-and-why-might-we-expect-to-see

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.

Benito has an interesting job. Here’s some of the stuff he’s had to do over the past couple years:

• build a prototype of an office
• resolve neighbor complaints at a party
• find housing for 13 people with 2 days notice
• figure out an invite list for 100+ people for an office
• deal with people emailing a funder trying to get him defunded
• set moderation policies for LessWrong
• write public explanations of grantmaking decisions
• organize weekly online zoom events
• ship books internationally by Christmas
• moderate online debates
• do April Fools' Jokes on Lesswrong
• figure out which of 100s of applicants to do trial hires with

Quite a wide variety!

Benito illustrates an interesting feature of humans: you can give humans pretty arbitrary goals, pretty arbitrary jobs to do, pretty arbitrary problems to solve, and they'll go figure out how to do it. It seems like humans have some sort of “general-purpose problem-solving” capability.

Now, there’s more than one part of general-purpose problem solving. There’s efficient information-gathering and model-building and updating. There’s searching for promising plans. There’s execution (or, in the organizational context, operations). A general-purpose problem-solver needs general-purpose versions of all those. But for this post, I want to focus on the “searching for promising plans” part.

First things first: what is this “search” thing, anyway?