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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

#371

Post by 123-2dsh »

This is such a funny thread. First, a politely worded letter expressing concern about scooping while carefully avoiding to mention the term.

Then an AI bot draws a false Ramanujan analogy, is corrected several times but keeps insisting.

At the end a meek comment that Tao helped in opening Pandora's box, without engagement or likes.

Modern academics have been conditioned to feel powerless and obedient. The proper way would be to ignore all AI proofs and not grant them access to journals, because OpenAI admitted themselves that plagiarism cannot be ruled out.

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

#372

Post by squidbeak »

segmondy wrote: post #267
vessenes wrote: 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…

I agree with you and I'm nitpicking, but if you play a GM, you more than likely are playing Stockfish until your opponent's out of book.

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

#373

Post by Davidzheng »

an0malous wrote: post #368
Squarex wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? HN has always praised Library Genesis for example.

Libgen isn’t trying to sell you back the content for $100/month. No one would be complaining if OpenAI open sourced their models.

the second part is definitely not true

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

#374

Post by aaron695 »

Alien1Being wrote: post #252

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.

[dead]

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

#375

Post by kzz102 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #310
kzz102 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mathematical community was very competitive in its early years, but in the last 70 to 100 years, it has been generally less competitive and very collegial. The community was in a good place, and progress has been very good. In a few cases when competitiveness was ramped up, it lead to bad behaviour and destructive fights. Few would like to return to those competitive years.

Maybe it’s a dynamic equilibrium? We will become competitive for a while, then run out of questions, which in turn rewards pockets of collaboration?

I think both the competitiveness and and lack of problems will mean fewer people will do mathematics. I think collaboration will always be there, but the community as a whole will be smaller and weaker.

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

#376

Post by andrelaszlo »

vessenes wrote: 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…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49617391

Did you comment on the wrong thread? The original one makes more sense :)

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

#377

Post by squidbeak »

program_whiz wrote: post #367
znnajdla wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think humans necessarily become subpar when AI can do most of the work. Taking my own personal example, I have far more intellectual curiosity and improved my skills in programming far more with Claude Code than for 15 years of programming without AI simply because I was bogged down by boilerplate and grunt work. Now that AI handles most of the boilerplate and grunt work and can handle harder and harder probl…

So when AI is also better at coming up with the tasks and already solving the frontier problems? 1M AI agents running full time thinking at 10M times faster than humans, with 100 times the intelligence in each agent? Any human ideas regarding "frontier problems" or "what the AI should focus on" are irrelevant. We have automated our own thinking and human cognition will be about as important as being "the best at abac…

Before AI, did you find that the existence of human expertise in the world far surpassing yours 'automated your thinking and cognition' or limited your intellectual scope to inventing party-tricks? I've always found greater intelligences than mine are like runways for curiosity. It's hard to believe anyone in their presence would fall into a stupor instead of being highly stimulated by them - and I can't see why it would be any different with ASI. Actually, this "AI undoes your cerebral strapping" argument seems exactly like the kind of slovenly thinking it wants to blame on AI.

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

#378

Post by LtWorf »

mitxela wrote: post #270
connorboyle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My computer contains the prime factorization of probably several dozen (if not more) large integers, and I refuse to share them with anyone! (Because they are my private RSA keys)

Why are you still using RSA?

I'm convinced that all the quantum talk is the NSA propaganda to convince us to drop RSA and move to some secure post quantum algorithm that they can easily break.

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

#379

Post by mathaccount101 »

After 20 years of prioritizing problem solving to the detriment of other mathematical skills, this problem solver point of view is about how to keep the control over the domain.

Now that problem solving proved to be easy, mathematics will become even more interesting.

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

#380

Post by empath75 »

dvt wrote: 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…

Let's say for the sake of argument that an LLM finds a counter example to the Reimann hypothesis. Wouldn't that just create a bunch of opportunities for understanding and explaining _why_ there is a counter example?
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