Re: Er
there is an example out there(you tube ) of a ML project to teach a small robot how to walk--- on its own... it was done at Cornell uni, iirc by Hod Lipson. The compute became rather intensive as you can imagine circa 2015, the robot was making progress and they wondered could they use the model in the same way to speed up computation to make it faster to do the matching and pruning of the robots heavy compute. The undergrad spent some time on it and after a few tweaks they had what became "mathbox". Now to your assertion that "given enough time and an understanding", what happened was word got out that they were able to get the box to come up with formulas that could streamline model computation and in some cases get it to create formulas hitherto unknown.
A botanist asked if he could use it to find out why one species of plant grew bigger in one hemisphere than the other. Mathbox was given the data and a while later the results of a formula were emailed back to the botanist, after reading it he, came back to the Ml lab to ask what the formula actually meant. To which they replied we don't know we figured you would. I think this was the birth of the current state of what we call a "blackbox".
Much of the world's financial processes work this way with less than 100 humans who know bits and bobs and who could if all put in a room, "theoretically" build a picture of how they all lace into each other.
You could in theory spend a life time with pen and paper but my guess would be you would only get to writing the absolute mind boggeling amount of data that would be needed to form a working mathematical framework before actually getting to do any calculating and verifying. Good luck and god speed, there is some award waiting for you if you prove me wrong and I really hope that there is a human who can & will.
Mathbox cost $6000 a month and only ran on their very secure network... last time I looked... you do have to be quite specific with your search terms to get past the education sales and marketing to find the site as I remember. Lipson is now a professor of Engineering and Data Science at Columbia University
