They're solving them in a way that isn't particularly interesting because it's near impossible to read and understand, and follow, what the LLM did. It's this way not because it's so smart, but because it's so stupid and still reached the goal by pure force and effort.

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QuesnayJr a day ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know how to communicate this, but what you are saying is almost entirely wrong.

People can follow what they did. The documents OpenAi produced in their big drop are hard to read because they are poorly written in weird ways, not because they are beyond human intelligence. They didn't brute force in the normal sense. AI doesn't get tired, so it can try 1000 promising ideas, but it's like 1000 Ph.D.-level mathematicians trying different ideas, not 1000 calculators trying all combinations.

The biggest results -- quasi-Riemann, no Siegel zeros, and Unique Games Conjecture -- have already been digested by experts. No Siegel zeros in particular already has like five different write-ups, and Tao has written a exposition on his blog.

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rsfern a day ago | parent [-]

So did we get any new mathematics out of this, or just solutions to problems without new techniques or insights? I haven’t been able to keep up with this or read the writeups you mention, genuinely wondering since this seems to be a central concern of the math community

	▲	QuesnayJr 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's only been a month and people aren't that fast, but I think yes. Analytic number theory and complexity theory were stuck on the lack of progress on certain questions, that is now unstuck.

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JPLeRouzic a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I am sorry but your argument looks to contradict itself: They solve hard mathematical problems because they are stupid and use brute force? Then why a human skilled in mathematics guided them for many turns in their conversation?

If they were really stupid, a Prolog program, a genetic algorithm or a SAT solver would be enough to reach the goal. Clearly it was not the case.

	▲	suddenlybananas a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Can't you kind of think of them as a genetic algorithm that has a very good hypothesis generator? Humans could, in principle, help guide that (already very impressive) hypothesis generator to make better guesses to find the proof more easily.
	▲	YeGoblynQueenne 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>> If they were really stupid, a Prolog program, a genetic algorithm or a SAT solver would be enough to reach the goal. Clearly it was not the case. "Clearly" as in "somebody tried that and failed" or "clearly" as in nobody ever thought to try it and now nobody will because there's no point?