AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

Post by dandaka » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

delusional wrote: post #202

paulpauper wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, LLMs are great at generating negative results for math-related prompts "We scanned values {a,b,c} from 0-100 and no results" Great..too bad journals will not publish this. But good job, I guess. A negative result is only truly useful if it can be bounded, requiring an actual proof.

> A negative result is only truly useful if it can be bounded, requiring an actual proof. That's at least true for current journals, since they're supposed to be read by actual humans. I suppose one could imagine a sort of "AI" pure data journal that just "publishes" (in actuality aggregates) any sort of partial result. This body of knowledge would be entirely useless to humans, but could serve as a sort of "computat…

Post by whythismatters » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #233

ben_w wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entirety of human civilization is human shaped. That's the marketing pitch. A plumbing robot doesn't need to be humanoid, an octopus shape may well be better for all the awkward corners. A robot police officer could be the municipality itself for sensory nodes (essentially the sales pitch of Flock etc.), plus some drones or robot dogs to perform arrests*. The robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers we already have…

You are not understanding what humanoid robots are about. Those are specialist robots you are describing. The promise is of course one robot that can do the plumbing, clean your house, do the dishes, build a house, and basically every physical job a human can do. It's extreme lly likely that at least a somewhat humanoid shape is required for that.

Post by mcv » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

hibikir wrote: post #198

I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…

Post by bhaak » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC

xboxnolifes wrote: post #126

Animats wrote: post #33

Yes. That's how LLMs do programming, mostly. It's also why LLMs don't need abstractions or parsimony as much as humans. They can work on something complicated without simplifying it first. This has major implications that haven't been fully realized yet. On the math side, there are long machine generated proofs. On the code side, there are high volumes of code with similar code not being folded into functions.

LLMs use abstractions a ton in code though: standard library functions, popular libraries, etc. They just dont always make their own abstractions. At least not particularly good ones. LLMs work really well when they have well abstracted pieces to put together.

Post by margorczynski » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

re-framer wrote: post #252

I can't help but think of Michael Nielsen's essay "Augmenting Long-Term Memory" [1]. > Many people's model of accomplished mathematicians is that they are astoundingly bright, with very high IQs, and the ability to deal with very complex ideas in their mind. A common perception is that their smartness gives them the ability to deal with very complex ideas. Basically, they have a higher horsepower engine. > It's true…