Comment by NooneAtAll3
Comment by NooneAtAll3 2 days ago
reading the original paper and the lean statement that got proven, it's kinda fascinating what exactly is considered interesting and hard in this problem
roughly, what lean theorem (and statement on the website) asks is this: take some numbers t_i, for each of them form all the powers t_i^j, then combine all into multiset T. Barring some necessary conditions, prove that you can take subset of T to sum to any number you want
what Erdosh problem in the paper asks is to add one more step - arbitrarily cut off beginnings of t_i^j power sequences before merging. Erdosh-and-co conjectured that only finite amount of subset sums stop being possible
"subsets sum to any number" is an easy condition to check (that's why "olympiad level" gets mentioned in the discussion) - and it's the "arbitrarily cut off" that's the part that og question is all about, while "only finite amount disappear" is hard to grasp formulaically
so... overhyped yes, not actually erdos problem proven yes, usual math olympiad level problems are solvable by current level of Ai as was shown by this year's IMO - also yes (just don't get caught by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect on the backlash since olympiads are haaard! really!)
I’d be less skeptical about this year’s IMO claims if we had any information at all on how it was done.