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Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

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Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#271

Tao's central point seems to be : "In short, the indiscriminate use of powerful solution-extraction tools can achieve the immediate short-term goal of solving problems at hand, but at the cost of sustaining the ecosystem for the next wave of progress, or in understanding the progress already obtained. " I am no mathematician, may have misunderstood his point and would be delighted to receive any corrections.

Doesn't this seem to be where all domains are headed?

I get kinda freaked out when I feel like all the AI "utopianists" haven't taken the next logical step of thinking about what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain (and you may argue this won't happen, though I'm becoming more and more a believer that it will, but my point is the utopianists believe that this absolutely will happen, and that it's also a wonderful thing). How motivated do you think folks will be to do the hard cognitive work to focus on things like math problems when there is a good chance AI will do it better?

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#272
post #269

Tao's central point seems to be : "In short, the indiscriminate use of powerful solution-extraction tools can achieve the immediate short-term goal of solving problems at hand, but at the cost of sustaining the ecosystem for the next wave of progress, or in understanding the progress already obtained. " I am no mathematician, may have misunderstood his point and would be delighted to receive any corrections.

How is this any different from people in any field that are impacted by AI and lose the utility of their skills and endeavors over the past decades? Are we saying that we're running out of problems to solve because of AI and hence it should be stopped? I am not underestimating the importance of the collective knowledge of the mathematics community and the role of mathematics as the enablers of other sciences, but opp…

Do you see an end state in this? When AI is better than humans at everything (and I used to be very sceptical of that claim but I'm getting less and less by the day), I don't see the Wall-E version of humanity as some sort of utopia, and that's the good outcome.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#273
post #52

I'm with @nilesh on this one, and not exactly sure how merely the existence of a solution precludes the advancement of human knowledge. If a problem is "solved" (say, symbolically verified) without any insights gained, it doesn't seem very interesting to the profession. Navier-Stokes is a bit different (because there's a prize attached, so "scooping" matters), but almost all interesting problems don't have any prizes…

AI companies don't share the dead ends and only sometimes a bit of the process toward success so people don't understand what was curious along the way.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#275
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be wrong, but making an assumption that you could learn to read the mathematical output of the AI long before you could write a solution yourself. But hey, what do I know, I'm not a mathemagition.

What does "mathematical output of the AI" even mean? A proof? Intermediate tokens?

It's a Lean program that proves the theorem.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#276

The way to tame a profit-maximizer is to make the most profitable choice the one that creates the most societal good. I would like to see the Clay Institute give zero recognition for formalizations without human-readable proofs. That would incentivize OpenAI to scram or create something that's actually useful.

It would be trivially easy to convert Lean into English, so I’m not sure what the human-readable criteria gets you. There are also human written proofs that are considered not human-readable by most of the mathematics community (ABC conjecture).

Human-readable means multiple humans can read and understand it in full. A human-readable proof is more worth more than one that is not, because mathematicians can read the proof and extract value in the form of reusable techniques, additional problems, progress towards related problems, and everything else Tao mentioned. A proof that only a few humans can read is more useful than one that no human can read because the few mathematicians that can read the proof can still extract value in the form of reusable techniques, additional problems, progress towards related problems, and everything else Tao mentioned. That's what the human-readable criteria gets you.

Mochizuki's claimed proof of the ABC conjecture is not unintelligable; it has errors. There are no proofs written by humans that are not human-readable, because in order to come out of a human mind, the proof must have fit there originally.

The four color theorem states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. It was the first theorem proved with substantial computer assistance. The theorem was proved by showing there could not be a counterexample. The authors made a list of maps where if a minimal counterexample existed, it would be one of these maps. There were 1,834 maps in that list, and each one was checked by computer. You could turn each of those cases into a picture or paragraph, but the resulting artefact would not meet my definition of human-readable.

Human-readable does not just mean in English. Humans can only hold a few objects in their short-term memory at once, not hundreds. Though some proofs require significant background knowlege, any proof written by a human will respect the fundemental limits of the human mind. There are no proofs written by humans that are not human-readable, because in order to come out of a human mind, the proof must have fit there originally.

I suspect large lean proofs generated by LLMs do not respect the fundemental limits of the human mind. If no human can read and understand them, no one can extract value in the form of reusable techniques, additional problems, progress towards related problems, and everything else Tao mentioned. If LLM proof generators can be made to write proofs with the same value as humans, that would be great! OpenAI would be a celebrated collaborator if they created as much value as a human does.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#277
post #3

That’s not untrue. But it’s also a misstatement of mathematical history. Many leading mathematicians historically have been highly competitive — Gauss comes to mind. Woe betide the lesser intellect that sent Gauss some ideas. The Newton Leibniz controversy was very serious business at the time in the UK and the continent. It was considered at the least a sin to reveal that sqrt(2) was irrational to those outside Pyth…

You miss the point. Humans don't mind competing with others. I love competition, but I don't want to compete with you and your machine. I love to play chess, I don't care if you are grand master, whoop my ass. But not if you are going to pair up with stockfish. I don't even care if you are a newbie that started playing yesterday with an ELO rating of 900. If I wanted to play the damn computer I'll do it myself. Likew…

Could you tell the difference between a grandmaster and stockfish if playing them online? If not, why would you care which one you are playing against?

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#278

Tao's central point seems to be : "In short, the indiscriminate use of powerful solution-extraction tools can achieve the immediate short-term goal of solving problems at hand, but at the cost of sustaining the ecosystem for the next wave of progress, or in understanding the progress already obtained. " I am no mathematician, may have misunderstood his point and would be delighted to receive any corrections.

Doesn't this seem to be where all domains are headed? I get kinda freaked out when I feel like all the AI "utopianists" haven't taken the next logical step of thinking about what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain (and you may argue this won't happen, though I'm becoming more and more a believer that it will, but my point is the utopianists believe that this absolutely will happen, and that it'…

Doesn't the premise that there's something inferior about these AI solutions, imply that there is something superior about human intelligence and that there will continue to be some kind of useful work for humans to do?

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#279
post #213

I don’t see why it makes a meaningful difference if a human solves a math problem versus AI - it seems like the same amount of understanding will come out in the end. Either the understanding will come from humans arriving at the proof in the former case, or the understanding will come from humans understanding the proof that the AI came up with in the latter.

Because the problem has almost no value unto itself. The clay statement of navier stokes is not relevant to how CFD is done in practice. It's about what is non verifiable versus verifiable. The same way it produces "slop" code (which, if you give it test cases, will be 100% correct), it also produces "slop" math. Code that serves a business function, it's ok if its slop. Math that serves directly a business function…

> Code that serves a business function might as well be slop. Math that serves directly a business function also can be slop.

Both of these are simply incorrect - serving a business function means it's valuable to that function.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#280
post #52

I'm with @nilesh on this one, and not exactly sure how merely the existence of a solution precludes the advancement of human knowledge. If a problem is "solved" (say, symbolically verified) without any insights gained, it doesn't seem very interesting to the profession. Navier-Stokes is a bit different (because there's a prize attached, so "scooping" matters), but almost all interesting problems don't have any prizes…

Why was there a prize attached to this problem then? What does humanity get out of this being proved?

The millennium problems is something done by a single institute to motivate progress on known open problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems
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