Live data from Hacker News

AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

rishimehta.xyz

101–110 of 140 posts

Re: AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

#101
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you looking for Cyc [1], practically. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

Does Cyc have proofs?

In a sense, yes, since it has a foundation in Prolog style facts and rules, and supposedly can output its reasoning.

Re: AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

#102
Mathematicians have been using computers, programming languages, and proof engines for over half a century; however breakthroughs in mathematics are still made by humans in any meaningful sense, even though the tools they use and make are increasingly complex.

But as things look now, I will be willing to bet that the next major breakthrough in maths will be touted as being AI/LLMs and coming out of one of the big US tech companies rather than some German university.

Why? Simply, the money is much bigger. Such an event would pop the market value of the company involved by a hundred billion - plenty of incentive right there to paint whatever as AI and hire whoever.

Re: AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

#103
post #70

I think the interface of LLM with formalized languages is really the future. Because here you can formally verify every statement and deal with hallucinations.

So, you looking for Cyc [1], practically. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

You reminded me of my pains with OpenCyc in my student job. Thanks :D

Re: AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

#104
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Cyc have proofs?

In a sense, yes, since it has a foundation in Prolog style facts and rules, and supposedly can output its reasoning.

Ok, sounds like in principle you could have proofs, but in practice, you don't?

Are there any checks for the consistency of all facts?

Re: AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

#105
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sense, yes, since it has a foundation in Prolog style facts and rules, and supposedly can output its reasoning.

Ok, sounds like in principle you could have proofs, but in practice, you don't? Are there any checks for the consistency of all facts?

How could there be? Gödel gets in the way.

Re: AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

#106

Is it currently possible to reliably limit the cut-off knowledge of an LLM (either during training or inference)? An interesting experiment would be to feed an LLM mathematical knowledge only up to the year of proving a theorem, and then see if it can actually come up with the novel techniques used in the proof. For example, having only access to papers prior to 1993, can an LLM come up with Wiles' proof of FLT?

That should be doable, e.g. by semi-automated curation of the pre-training dataset. However, since curating such large datasets and running pre-training runs is so expensive, I doubt that anybody will run such an experiment. Especially since would have to trust that the curation process was correct enough for the end-result to be meaningful. Checking that the curation process is not flawed is probably as expensive as running it in the first place.

Re: AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

#107

Is it currently possible to reliably limit the cut-off knowledge of an LLM (either during training or inference)? An interesting experiment would be to feed an LLM mathematical knowledge only up to the year of proving a theorem, and then see if it can actually come up with the novel techniques used in the proof. For example, having only access to papers prior to 1993, can an LLM come up with Wiles' proof of FLT?

There's the Frontier Math benchmarks [0] demonstrating that AI is currently quite far from human performance at research-level mathematics.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04872

Re: AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

#108
post #102

Mathematicians have been using computers, programming languages, and proof engines for over half a century; however breakthroughs in mathematics are still made by humans in any meaningful sense, even though the tools they use and make are increasingly complex. But as things look now, I will be willing to bet that the next major breakthrough in maths will be touted as being AI/LLMs and coming out of one of the big US…

But, these AI solutions are trying to solve math problems to prove their AI capabilities, not because they care about mathematics.

Re: AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

#109
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, sounds like in principle you could have proofs, but in practice, you don't? Are there any checks for the consistency of all facts?

How could there be? Gödel gets in the way.

In most interactive theorem provers the check is simple: you single out the axioms you believe, and all other stuff you do is guaranteed to preserve consistency. That works in an ITP system because there are only a few axioms.

If Cyc has 100000 axioms/facts, then that's a problem.

Re: AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

#110
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a bad example, P vs NP is the most likely of the millennium problems to be unsolvable, so the answer may be "never". I'll bet the most technical open problems will be the ones to fall first. What AIs lack in creativity they make up for in ability to absorb a large quantity of technical concepts.

Ok, then the AI should formally prove that it's "unsolvable" (however you meant it).

Unsolvable would mean that no proof exists, and no disproof exists, in whatever axiom system (eg ZF). While in some cases you can hack around this by proving eg "no proof and no disproof exist in ZF, if ZF is consistent", IIUC that's not always possible. It's like asking "when will AI be strong enough that it can always decide correctly whether a given computer program halts?"

Then again, it's fairly likely that P=?NP is decidable but we just don't have any idea how to prove it. In that case the question is more or less "what's the time horizon until AI is vastly better than humans at formal math?", to which the answer is certainly "we don't know, there may be obstacles, just wait and see".

Post reply on HN