Gauss vs the machine: what the 1-to-100 sum trick says about ML and computation
tobias_rees · x · 2026-10-22
tobiasrees riffs on the difference between compute and compute: schoolboy Gauss didn't do 99 additions to sum 1..100 — he saw the numbers pair up (1+100, 2+99, ...) into 50 pairs of 101, giving 5050. A machine does the additions. A neat thought experiment on intelligence vs computation, applied (with self-aware caveats) to ML.
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