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Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#301

Post by ghusbands »

gorgoiler wrote: post #216

I asked ChatGPT to draw the outline of an ellipse using Unicode braille. I asked for 30x8 and it absolutely nailed it. A beautiful piece of ascii (er, Unicode) art. But I wanted to mark the origin! So I asked for a 31x7 ellipse instead. It completely flubbed it, and for 31x9 too. When a model gives a really good answer, does that just mean it’s seen the problem before? When it gives a crappy answer, is that not simpl…

Do you posit that there are enough examples of 30x8 ellipses encoded in braille online for ChatGPT to learn from but not 31x7 or 31x9 ellipses? That seems unlikely.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#302

Post by Jtarii »

bsza wrote: post #237
threethirtytwo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because HN is not really full of smart people. It's full of people who think they're smart and take pride in that idea that they're pretty intelligent. ChatGPT equalizes intelligence. And that is an attack on their identity. It also exposes their ACTUAL intelligence which is to say most of HN is not too smart.

> ChatGPT equalizes intelligence Yes, I love living in communism too. Imagine if you had to pay money for it or something. The wealthiest people would get unrestricted access to intelligence while the poor none. And the people in the middle would eventually find themselves unable to function without a product they can no longer afford. Chilling, huh? Good thing humans are known for sharing in the benefits of technolo…

Huh?

Before ChatGPT it costs ~$100,000 to aquire intelligence good enough to solve this Erdos problem, now it costs ~$200.

I'm really confused at what you are even taking an issue with.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#304

Post by logicprog »

nomilk wrote: post #229

A similar announcement was made a few months ago, and Terence Tao came out a few days later and said it wasn't what it seemed at first, in that it was a rediscovery of an already known (albeit esoteric) result...

They literally have a quote from Tao in the article saying it was a novel approach humans hadn't tried, and that the problem hadn't been solved even after a lot of professional attention.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#305

Post by chrisweekly »

kbrkbr wrote: post #212
trhway wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a civilization we went the left-brained/sequential/language based way of thinking (with computers and AI being the crown achievement of it). Personally i for example remember like around 3rd grade i switched from the whole-page-at-once reading mode into the word by word line by line mode and that mode stuck with me since then (at some point while at the University i had for some period of time, probably it was the…

If that is your hope you are probably in for a rude awakening. Left brained/right brained is a wooden exaggeration according to more recent research [1]. [1] e.g. https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/left-brain-vs-right-brain-t...

Well, maybe. The poster you replied to wasn't discussing literal neuroanatomy, they were using "left/right-brained" in the colloquial, metaphorical sense.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#306

Post by Jtarii »

maplethorpe wrote: post #144
hx8 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “I didn’t know what the problem was—I was just doing Erdős problems as I do sometimes, giving them to the AI and seeing what it can come up with,” he says. “And it came up with what looked like a right solution.” He sent it to his occasional collaborator Kevin Barreto, a second-year undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Seems like standard 23 year old behavior. You're spending $100-$200/mo on…

Couldn't he have just asked ChatGPT if it was correct? Why do we still feel the need to loop in a human?

Because society is run by humans, not chatpgt.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#307

Post by menno-sh »

torginus wrote: post #280
debo_ wrote: post #33

> “The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say,” Lichtman says. This is how I feel when I read any mathematics paper.

Tbh, a ton of academic papers are quite poorly written. I'm not a PhD researcher, but I did have to implement quite a few of the, (computer graphics, signals & systems etc), and with most of them, I basically reconstruct the author's tought process from scratch. The formulas were opaque, notations unique and unconventional, terms appearing out of nowhere, sometimes standard techniques (like 'we did least-squares opti…

My short academic career where I did my share of "what the hell are they saying they did" reverse engineering others' papers proved to be an excellent training for when I eventually transitioned to engineering.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#308

Post by mrabcx »

nycdatasci wrote: post #92
adamgordonbell wrote: post #3

Here is the chat: don't search the internet. This is a test to see how well you can craft non-trivial, novel and creative proofs given a "number theory and primitive sets" math problem. Provide a full unconditional proof or disproof of the problem. {{problem}} REMEMBER - this unconditional argument may require non-trivial, creative and novel elements. Then "Thought for 80m 17s" https://chatgpt.com/share/69dd1c83-b164…

Tried w/ 5.5 Pro, Extended Thinking. 17 minutes: ----------------------------- Yes. In fact the proposed bound is true, and the constant 1 is sharp. Let w(a)= 1/alog(a) I will prove that, uniformly for every primitive A⊂[x,∞), ∑w(a)≤1+O(1/log(x)) , which is stronger than the requested 1+o(1). https://chatgpt.com/share/69ed8e24-15e8-83ea-96ac-784801e4a6...

Tried the same prompt in DeepSeek 4

https://chat.deepseek.com/share/nyuz0vvy2unfbb97fv

Comes up with a proof.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#309

Post by yfee »

torginus wrote: post #280
debo_ wrote: post #33

> “The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say,” Lichtman says. This is how I feel when I read any mathematics paper.

Tbh, a ton of academic papers are quite poorly written. I'm not a PhD researcher, but I did have to implement quite a few of the, (computer graphics, signals & systems etc), and with most of them, I basically reconstruct the author's tought process from scratch. The formulas were opaque, notations unique and unconventional, terms appearing out of nowhere, sometimes standard techniques (like 'we did least-squares opti…

The standard has fallen over the years for obvious reasons.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#310

Post by jvln »

moffkalast wrote: post #232
_Microft wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your idea of "creative"/"creativity" then?

Coming up with said novel techniques in the first place. Arguably something that most humans can't really do reliably or at all.

I always thought that way about genius level.
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