Comment by ares623

Comment by ares623 3 days ago

8 replies

This is me being snarky and ignorant, but if it solved one problem and it is automated what’s stopping it from solving all the others? That’s what’s ultimately being sold by the tweet right.

aeve890 3 days ago

>This is me being snarky and ignorant, but if it solved one problem and it is automated what’s stopping it from solving all the others?

Yeah that's the crux of the matter. How do AI did it? Using already existing math. If we need new math to prove Collatz, Goldbach or Riemman, LLMs are simply SOL. That's what's missing and hype boys always avoid to mention.

  • dwohnitmok 2 days ago

    > How do AI did it? Using already existing math. If we need new math to prove Collatz, Goldbach or Riemman, LLMs are simply SOL.

    An unproved theorem now proved is by definition new math. Will LLMs get you to Collatz, Goldbach, or Riemann? Unclear.

    But it's not like there's some magical, entirely unrelated to existing math, "new math" that was required to solve all the big conjectures of the past. They proceeded, as always, by proving new theorems one by one.

    • yorwba 2 days ago

      Yes, "new math" is neither magical nor unrelated to existing math, but that doesn't mean any new theorem or proof is automatically "new math." I think the term is usually reserved for the definition of a new kind of mathematical object, about which you prove theorems relating it to existing math, which then allows you to construct qualitatively new proofs by transforming statements into the language of your new kind of object and back.

      I think eventually LLMs will also be used as part of systems that come up with new, broadly useful definitions, but we're not there yet.

    • aeve890 2 days ago

      >An unproved theorem now proved is by definition new math.

      No. By _new math_ I mean new mathematical constructs and theories like (to mention the "newest" ones) category theory, information theory, homotopy type theory, etc. Something like Cantor inventing set theory, or Shannon with information theory, or Euler with graph theory.

      AFAIK no new field of mathematics as been created _by_ AI. Feel free to correct me.

ComplexSystems 3 days ago

Ultimately the main thing that will stop it from solving literally "all the others" are things like the impossibility of solving the halting problem, considerations like P ≠ NP, etc. But as we have just seen, despite these impossibility theorems, AI systems are still able to make substantive progress on solving important open real-world problems.

  • thaumasiotes 2 days ago

    > But as we have just seen, despite these impossibility theorems, AI systems are still able to make substantive progress on solving important open real-world problems.

    You seem to be smuggling in the assumption that this problem was "important".

    • anon291 a day ago

      All problems are important. You never know what might be useful.