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Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

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Re: Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

#31

Post by adamddev1 »

qarl wrote: post #21
oasisaimlessly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still an unknown whether an unqualified increase in productivity in the long-term for software engineering is a given.

Really? OK - then let me stand up and vouch that I am at least 20X more productive with AI.

Would I be wrong to assume that you are building end-user applications?

If people use AI for libraries, OSs, and mission critical software, the apparent productivity gains would have to be weighed against the reliability and performance hits that bubble up to the things that are built on them and rely on them.

Re: Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

#33

Post by skybrian »

bananaflag wrote: post #9
htrp wrote: post #3

the fact that you have to encourage these models and tell them that they can solve these problems and warm up on easier problems seems to indicate that there's something to AI pairing above and beyond prompt

Yeah it s because they have a strong prior on unsolved problems being unsolvable. Once the idea of AI routinely solving conjectures enters the training data this encouragement will disappear like 2023-era prompt engineering did.

It will likely burn a lot of tokens, take a long time, and might not work, so hopefully they'll still ask if you really want to spend the money on the attempt.

Re: Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

#34

Post by skybrian »

catpower wrote: post #6

Great short term achievement but humanity is better served by these kids doing it without AI. The ideas have to come from the next generation (eg would we be worried if a 5 year old wrote the great American novel with AI or not?)

I think it's more like how anyone learning to play chess is going to use chess engines, but you can't learn to play by always asking the chess engine for the answer.

I expect that all mathematicians are going to be working with power tools, so they might as well learn about that. They will still need to do math exercises by hand to learn the material.

Re: Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

#35

Post by qarl »

dermacentor wrote: post #25
qarl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? OK - then let me stand up and vouch that I am at least 20X more productive with AI.

In the long term.

Fair enough - it will take some time before the science comes back.

But I feel the need to point out - the goalposts for "does AI work" shift daily.

Re: Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

#36

Post by qarl »

adamddev1 wrote: post #31
qarl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? OK - then let me stand up and vouch that I am at least 20X more productive with AI.

Would I be wrong to assume that you are building end-user applications? If people use AI for libraries, OSs, and mission critical software, the apparent productivity gains would have to be weighed against the reliability and performance hits that bubble up to the things that are built on them and rely on them.

In my experience - a robust testing harness will get you the safety you need. And most software you describe has such testing.

I think the Bun port is a great example where testing enabled a very successful implementation. (Both the original tests themselves and runtime comparisons to the previous implementation.)

Re: Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

#37

Post by rowanG077 »

arscan wrote: post #18
bananaflag wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it s because they have a strong prior on unsolved problems being unsolvable. Once the idea of AI routinely solving conjectures enters the training data this encouragement will disappear like 2023-era prompt engineering did.

I would think this type of behavior (ugh, or dare I say default mindset) by consumer-facing LLMs will always be desirable for ‘hard’ problems (things previously unsolved) because it’s a bit like having saftey mechanisms in place to prevent hallucinations for users incapable of verifying correctness of the output. You’ve got to do a little work to prove you understand that it’s hard but it’s still something the LLM mi…

I think this is also a healthy mindset for a person to have in many cases. If my boss asks me "go solve P = NP", as extreme example, I would also give some pushback.

Re: Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

#38

Post by measurablefunc »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #27
measurablefunc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is not going away so people will have to get used to it just like they will have to get used to it in software engineering. The alternative is being less productive than people who are happy to use AI to write software & do mathematical research.

But isn't it a horrible thing that what you just described (being forced by the prisoner's dilemma), is what defines progress these days?

There is nothing I can do about that. Investors & shareholders believe that AI is the future so that's where all the money is going.

Re: Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

#39

Post by random3 »

no-name-here wrote: post #7

Real title includes: > Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students with AI My title recommendation: Fields Medalist Problem Solved With AI They used AI for “ computation, proof idea generation , and editing assistance”. It’s a bit odd how they list the AIs used - “Claude Opus 5, Anthropic and ChatGPT Sol5.6 were used for calculations, proof ideas, and editorial assistance.”

note HEAVILY

> The students heavily utilized AI assistants, specifically Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, for computational exploration, proof idea generation, and editing.

this is a bit like Enhanced Olympics(https://www.enhanced.com), except that you have someone else compete for you.

My issue is that it makes it hard to distinguish real insight/work etc. from effectively null one.

An old instance of the same issue was with what was called "script kiddie" back in the 90-00s

Re: Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

#40

Post by kelseyfrog »

no-name-here wrote: post #7

Real title includes: > Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students with AI My title recommendation: Fields Medalist Problem Solved With AI They used AI for “ computation, proof idea generation , and editing assistance”. It’s a bit odd how they list the AIs used - “Claude Opus 5, Anthropic and ChatGPT Sol5.6 were used for calculations, proof ideas, and editorial assistance.”

It means that the solution is merely an interpolation of existing work and not fundamentally innovative as AI can only regurgitate, never creating something new.
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