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An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

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Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#51

AI isn't going to supercharge science but I wouldn't be as dismissive as other posters here.

It will notice things that humans may have missed. That said - it can only work off the body of work SOMEONE did in the past.

Can't the previous body of work be from AI too?

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#54

As I have stated before, AI will win a fields medal before it can manage a McDonald's A difficult part was constructing a chess board on which to play math (Lean). Now it's just pattern recognition and computation. LLMs are just the beginning, we'll see more specialized math AI resembling StockFish soon.

Managing a McDonalds is a question of integration and modalities at this point. I don't think anyone still doubts that these models lack the reasoning capability or world knowledge needed for the job. So it's less of a fundamental technical problem and more of a process engineering issue.

The capability they lack is being able to be sued.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#55
post #22

While the result is impressive, this blog post is extremely disappointing. - It does not show an example of the new best solution, nor explain why they couldn't show an example (e.g. if the proof was not constructive) - It does not even explain the previous best solution. The diagram of the rescaled unit grid doesn't indicate what the "points" are beyond the normal non-scaled unit grid. I have no idea what to take aw…

Indeed, it's a pity. While many advanced math problems are highly abstract or convoluted to explain to a layman audience, this one in particular is about points in a 2D plane and distances. A drawing would have been nice.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#56

As I have stated before, AI will win a fields medal before it can manage a McDonald's A difficult part was constructing a chess board on which to play math (Lean). Now it's just pattern recognition and computation. LLMs are just the beginning, we'll see more specialized math AI resembling StockFish soon.

AI is already too old for that.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#57

AI isn't going to supercharge science but I wouldn't be as dismissive as other posters here.

I absolutely believe that AI will supercharge science. I do not believe it will replace humans.

replace, no. obsolete, yes

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#58
post #30

Is there a reason why we only hear of Erdos problems being solved? I would imagine there are a myriad of other unsolved problems in math, but every single ChatGPT "breakthrough in math" I come across on r/singularity and r/accelerate are Erdos problems.

It's a large set of problems that are both interesting and difficult, but not seen as foundational enough or important enough that they have already had sustained attention on them by mathematicians for decades or centuries, and so they might actually be solvable by an LLM.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#60
For anyone using LLMs heavily for coding, this shouldn't be too surprising. It was just a matter of time.

Mathematicians make new discoveries by building and applying mathematical tools in new ways. It is tons of iterative work, following hunches and exploring connections. While true that LLMs can't truly "make discoveries" since they have no sense of what that would mean, they can Monte Carlo every mathematical tool at a narrow objective and see what sticks, then build on that or combine improvements.

Reading the article, that seems exactly how the discovery was made, an LLM used a "surprising connection" to go beyond the expected result. But the result has no meaning without the human intent behind the objective, human understanding to value the new pathway the AI used (more valuable than the result itself, by far) and the mathematical language (built by humans) to explore the concept.

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