Can AI do maths yet? Thoughts from a mathematician • Hacker News Board

Re: Can AI do maths yet? Thoughts from a mathematician

#361

Post by vlovich123 » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 4:24 AM UTC

khafra wrote: post #287

vlovich123 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can AI solve “toy” math problems that computers have not been able to do? Yes. Can AI produce novel math research? No, it hasn’t yet. So “AI will not do math for us” is only factually wrong if you take the weaker definition of “doing math for us”. The stronger definition is not factually wrong yet. More problematic with that statement is that a timeline isn’t specified. 1 year? Probably not. 10 years? Probably. 20 ye…

This is a pretty strong position to take in the comments of a post where a mathematician declared the 5 problems he'd seen to be PhD level, and speculated that the real difficulty with switching from numerical answers to proofs will be finding humans qualified to judge the AI's answers. I will agree that it's likely none of us here will be alive to be proven wrong, but that's in the 1 to 10 year range.

solving PhD level problems != producing new lines of research. PhDs are typically given problems their advisors know are solvable but difficult and might contribute in some way to a larger scope of research the PhD doesn’t yet understand or hasn’t earned the “right” to explore on their own. And phds do frequently do their own research exploration, but that doesn’t involve solving these kinds of “PhD-level” problems which just means having the knowledge about the techniques available and creativity in applying to solving them (as evidenced by the poster noting how they could solve some of these on their own fairly quickly).

I don’t see how my position is so exceptionally strong. I’m saying indeed there’s a 55-70% probability that this happens in the 1-10 year time frame. At 1-20 it goes up to 70-90%. It’s still important to leave room for doubt that we might miss something or be unable to build something for a long time. Trying to state otherwise seems like an even stronger position to take to me.

Re: Can AI do maths yet? Thoughts from a mathematician

#362

Post by eleveriven » Sun, Dec 29, 2024, 9:35 PM UTC

Sparkyte wrote: post #294

eleveriven wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there’s potential for AI to develop a kind of probabilistic reasoning?

It think it is every sci-fiction dreamer to teach a robot to love. I don't think AI will think conventionally. It isn't thinking to begin with. It is weighing options. Those options permutate and that is why every response is different.

I think teaching a robot to "love" might be more about simulating behaviors and responses associated with love...

Re: Can AI do maths yet? Thoughts from a mathematician

#363

Post by ninetyninenine » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 6:53 AM UTC

immibis wrote: post #258

ninetyninenine wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your optimism should be tempered with the downside of progress meaning that AI in the near future may not only inspire creativity in humans, but it can replace human creativity all together. Why do I need to hire an artist for my movie/video game/advertisement when AI can replicate all the creativity I need.

This was about mathematics.

Creativity isn’t limited to mathematics. My examples just didn’t use mathematicians.

Re: Can AI do maths yet? Thoughts from a mathematician

#364

Post by khafra » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 2:27 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #361

khafra wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty strong position to take in the comments of a post where a mathematician declared the 5 problems he'd seen to be PhD level, and speculated that the real difficulty with switching from numerical answers to proofs will be finding humans qualified to judge the AI's answers. I will agree that it's likely none of us here will be alive to be proven wrong, but that's in the 1 to 10 year range.

solving PhD level problems != producing new lines of research. PhDs are typically given problems their advisors know are solvable but difficult and might contribute in some way to a larger scope of research the PhD doesn’t yet understand or hasn’t earned the “right” to explore on their own. And phds do frequently do their own research exploration, but that doesn’t involve solving these kinds of “PhD-level” problems w…

Yeah, I made the right reply, but to the wrong person. bubble12345 was confidently wrong, and bufferoverflow got downvoted for correcting him, but your caveats to his answer were fine; and that PDF is well within the sane range, even if mine is substantially tighter.