I’m still confused about the difference between HCH and the amplification step of IDA. Initially I thought that the difference is that with HCH, the assistants are other copies of the human, whereas in IDA the assistants are the distilled agents from the previous step (whose capabilities will be sub-human in early stages of IDA and super-human in later stages). However, this FAQ says “HCHs should not be visualized as having humans in the box.”
My next guess is that while HCH allows the recursion for spawning new assistants to be arbitrarily deep, the amplification step of IDA only allows a single level of spawning (i.e. the human can spawn new assistants, but the assistants themselves cannot make new assistants). Ajeya Cotra’s post on IDA talks about the human making calls to the assistant, but not about the assistants making further calls to other assistants, so it seems plausible to me that the recursive nature of HCH is the difference. Can someone who understands HCH/IDA confirm that this is a difference and/or name other differences?
I’m still confused about the difference between HCH and the amplification step of IDA. Initially I thought that the difference is that with HCH, the assistants are other copies of the human, whereas in IDA the assistants are the distilled agents from the previous step (whose capabilities will be sub-human in early stages of IDA and super-human in later stages). However, this FAQ says “HCHs should not be visualized as having humans in the box.”
My next guess is that while HCH allows the recursion for spawning new assistants to be arbitrarily deep, the amplification step of IDA only allows a single level of spawning (i.e. the human can spawn new assistants, but the assistants themselves cannot make new assistants). Ajeya Cotra’s post on IDA talks about the human making calls to the assistant, but not about the assistants making further calls to other assistants, so it seems plausible to me that the recursive nature of HCH is the difference. Can someone who understands HCH/IDA confirm that this is a difference and/or name other differences?