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Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

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Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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So many mathematicians over the years tried hard and failed, but now Anthropic just for some PR magically did it? And this after LLMs obtaining different math wins? What is your logic here really escapes my understanding.

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Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So many mathematicians over the years tried hard and failed, but now Anthropic just for some PR magically did it? And this after LLMs obtaining different math wins? What is your logic here really escapes my understanding.

There's a big difference between one shotting a counterexample using AI and using AI to find a counter-example by brute-force.

Both are impressive, of course, but they're hardly comparable.

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many mathematicians over the years tried hard and failed, but now Anthropic just for some PR magically did it? And this after LLMs obtaining different math wins? What is your logic here really escapes my understanding.

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Cheating how? The proof is in the pudding...

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#284
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many mathematicians over the years tried hard and failed, but now Anthropic just for some PR magically did it? And this after LLMs obtaining different math wins? What is your logic here really escapes my understanding.

They gave their "logic", such as it is ... and it's utterly irrational. Note that the "they" who published the counterexample on X is some rando mathematician (Levent Alpöge) working for Anthropic, not Anthropic the organization. He posted the counterexample in a tweet -- reason enough for "not disclosing the LLM chat session". There's no reason to think that it won't provided if asked for, but it hardly seems releva…

> some rando mathematician (Levent Alpöge) working for Anthropic, not Anthropic the organization

Why do you trust a random stranger so much? Will you hand over your car keys to a random stranger? Sharing the chat will take 30s of their time.

> There's no reason to think that it won't provided if asked for

But they didn't provide it.

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#285
> The incredible Yitan Zhang (https://newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty) worked on proving this conjecture for 7 years. Moh, his advisor, wrote that Zhang "failed miserably" in proving the Jacobian conjecture, "never published any paper on algebraic geometry" after leaving Purdue, and "wasted seven years of his own life and my time".

https://x.com/aminkarbasi/status/2079129649830137989

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#286
post #285

> The incredible Yitan Zhang ( https://newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty ) worked on proving this conjecture for 7 years. Moh, his advisor, wrote that Zhang "failed miserably" in proving the Jacobian conjecture, "never published any paper on algebraic geometry" after leaving Purdue, and "wasted seven years of his own life and my time". https://x.com/aminkarbasi/status/2079129649830137989 https://en.wik…

Zhang, Yitang’s life at Purdue (Jan 1985-1991) T.T.Moh - https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf

kind of a wild document to exist...

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many mathematicians over the years tried hard and failed, but now Anthropic just for some PR magically did it? And this after LLMs obtaining different math wins? What is your logic here really escapes my understanding.

There's a big difference between one shotting a counterexample using AI and using AI to find a counter-example by brute-force. Both are impressive, of course, but they're hardly comparable.

I'm not so sure. People had been trying to use brute force to find counterexamples before.

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#288
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They gave their "logic", such as it is ... and it's utterly irrational. Note that the "they" who published the counterexample on X is some rando mathematician (Levent Alpöge) working for Anthropic, not Anthropic the organization. He posted the counterexample in a tweet -- reason enough for "not disclosing the LLM chat session". There's no reason to think that it won't provided if asked for, but it hardly seems releva…

> some rando mathematician (Levent Alpöge) working for Anthropic, not Anthropic the organization Why do you trust a random stranger so much? Will you hand over your car keys to a random stranger? Sharing the chat will take 30s of their time. > There's no reason to think that it won't provided if asked for But they didn't provide it.

OK, so the two options are:

A) Claude really produced this counterexample

B) A mathematician working for Anthropic solved a problem mathematicians have been working on for more than a century, and then credited it to Claude for PR purposes

If you believe B is more likely, why would you then believe a proof in the form of a chat log, when said chat log could itself have been faked by Anthropic way more easily than solving the mathematical problem in the first place?

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I try it to win an argument on HN? That's a bizarre suggestion. Just look at the degree. If it were degree 47 in 17 variables then it wouldn't be surprising, but here it's surprising. Of course people tried hard to solve them all, which is why it's so surprising that they were open. If anything, the solutions have gotten easier. The unit distance graph solution relied on a famous theorem remote from graph t…

You can use that retroactive logic about any hard problem though. Unsolved murder cases, math, theoretical physics. If tons of smart humans try for years and fail and then an LLM tries for a few weeks or hours and succeeds, the implications are clear. And these are by far the dumbest LLMs will ever be.

The retrospective view is important, though. In retrospect, these problems weren't that hard. (The unit distance graph problem was the hardest.) There are some problems that still seem hard, even when we know the answer. Nobody thinks that Fermat's last theorem is easy, even though now know it to be true.

Before AI, it was pretty rare that a problem that turned to be unexpectedly easy, so mathematicians thought they were pretty good judges of it. (The last pre-AI example I can remember is the Gaussian correlation conjecture.) So thanks to AI we have learned that we were overconfident in our ability to judge difficulty.

If a truly major problem falls, like the Riemann hypothesis, and the proof turns out to be 10 pages, then the lesson will be a different one -- mathematicians are bad at math, and they should turn to more natural domains for them, like folding and putting away towels.

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