Cleo (Mathematician)

The page states:

In late 2023, a Reddit user known as "evilscientist311" conducted a comprehensive analysis of Cleo's activity patterns and interactions with other Stack Exchange accounts.

However, I and others were on the scent at least as far back as April, 2023. See for example: https://x.com/TheDavidSJ/status/1650957407902658571

	▲	professorseth 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Edit the wiki and add it!

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epcoa 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Were any of the 39 answers to a question that was not likely to be from a sock puppet?

Doesn’t necessarily make the solutions less impressive, but it’s kind of a relevant detail that is left out in the Wikipedia summary.

	▲	tibbar 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, it does make the solutions less impressive, right? Because it's much easier to compute the inverse of an integral than an integral. What's impressive here is more in composing problems that have nice answers and can't be solved by computer algebra systems, then the sock puppet trick to conceal that you ha the answer all along.

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snailmailman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think there are some interesting parallels between what the Cleo account did, and what the large AI companies are doing now with some of the proofs for previously unsolved theorems.

There may be some value in the answers, but for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution.

I wouldn't call myself a mathematician, but I encountered a few problems in my CS classes where I could work through the proof by hand, see that an algorithm works, and even mathematically prove it, but yet still didn't feel like I understood why it worked, or how the algorithm was invented/derived. But for many, the fact that it did work was enough.

	▲	sublinear 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution All of the value is in this understanding. So many people are still in denial about it, but "AI" really is just a natural language search engine. AI helps organize what has already been written by humans and was technically self-evident from our work. If we allow ourselves to continue down this anti-intellectual path and stop caring about why proofs work, we've basically entered another dark age. I'm not saying AI can't possibly help at all with building intuition, but clearly there are a lot of idiots in the class who just gotta raise their hand first to blurt out whatever trash they come up with on impulse. Those people need to be told to sit the fuck down already. Their uncontrolled ADHD is ruining everything. There's nothing intelligent about mindlessly rushing to compute an answer. That is literally what the last few years have felt like for everyone else.

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kylepomykala 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They found out who he was? That's amazing.