Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI

#141

Post by UpsideDownRide » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 3:46 AM UTC

lstodd wrote: post #117

epiccoleman wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man you went to a way cooler high school than me. I definitely was not taught anything that would help me understand how a nuclear reactor work.

having a lab assignment detecting beta-emission from 40-K (potassium-40 salt) is of course unthinkable nowadays. or idk, assembling a interferometer out of a HeNe laser for example. Whoa, no! Kids can get hurt!

You might have a massively distorted image of what average education looks like both now and back whenever you were in HS.

Re: Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI

#142

Post by oliculipolicula » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #140

oliculipolicula wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that humans can, for now, still do something that chatgpt can't. Distill [proofs. Even if some may hesitate call that understanding.] Compare the various summaries that humans have written on the Jacobian counterexample, to the chat logs that were archived.

Have you tried asking ChatGPT / Claude etc for a good summary?

Yes. Have you?

I'm not guessing that they aren't working on this aspect or that chatbots won't be able to do it in the futute. It just seems that we do have an advantage for now.

Re: Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI

#143

Post by mark_something » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:13 AM UTC

> “A big problem is AI is being used a lot by people who aren’t mathematicians, who don’t have a huge mathematical background and are not capable of verifying the output,” Bloom said. “They like to move fast, ask their AI to check it, it grows and grows. We’re seeing a lot more of these 100- to 200-page papers that people are posting. ‘I solved this theorem; I got AI to generate the proof and check the proof and write the paper.’ But no human has read it, and no human is going to read it. It’s a huge challenge now.”

Mathematics has the same problem as open source projects that are overwhelmed with AI slop!

Re: Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI

#144

Post by mrkandel » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 12:01 PM UTC

kadoban wrote: post #83

torginus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no honor in being stupid, yet I must admit I am stupid, as there's even less honor in being stupid and pretending otherwise. A lot of people were super hyped about OpenAI's 10 discoveries, but I still don't understand what they mean, and even if I did, what are the implications. Like, what are non-sofic groups, and what follows from the conclusion that they exist? I mean in the sense that quantum mechanics mi…

> What practical things are possible or might be possible due to these results? Not much, they're all fairly minor problems that have been solved, of ~entirely niche academic interest. It's so far more just that AI _can_ solve novel math problems, ones that humans didn't accidentally train the answer in and it just spit it back out.

Sofic groups are a pretty big things in group theory. Its the big project of one of one of our researchers.

I have no idea what it's about because im not in algebra but the algebraists say its a big thing.