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Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

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Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#431
post #112

This is a rare instance where feeding this groundbreaking information into an LLM gives _them_ psychosis. I fed this to claude code and watched it verify the result in 7 different ways to be 100% certain, and it was just flabbergasted. Quite remarkable.

Who knew DOES NOT COMPUTE would be an actual thing?

Captain Kirk defeated multiple evil computers this way

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#432
post #46

I've come to understand that while an LLM is a parrot, it's a parrot that's smarter than I am.

At least you recognize this. The average Redditor is not capable of such self-examination.

Highly relevant comment https://np.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1jh9c90/why_do_...>:

>Imagine you had a frozen [large language] model that is a 1:1 copy of the average person, let’s say, an average Redditor. Literally nobody would use that model because it can’t do anything. It can’t code, can’t do math, isn’t particularly creative at writing stories. It generalizes when it’s wrong and has biases that not even fine-tuning with facts can eliminate. And it hallucinates like crazy often stating opinions as facts, or thinking it is correct when it isn't.

>The only things it can do are basic tasks nobody needs a model for, because everyone can already do them. If you are lucky you get one that is pretty good in a singular narrow task. But that's the best it can get.

>and somehow this model won't shut up and tell everyone how smart and special it is also it claims consciousness. ridiculous.

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#434

A little over 10 years ago I remember meeting a postdoc who believed he had something close to a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture. He and another person was bruteforcing polynomials in about 16 variables, something like 80 - 700 terms each, using binary trees for mapping coefficients. They were guessing, at the time, that the lower bound of a counterexample (P, Q) for max(deg(P), deg(Q)) would go up to 200.…

you might be confusing 2 variable case (which indeed was tested to 150+ degree) and 3 variable case (this counterexample)

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The field now favors into the view that symbolic manipulation is not the mechanism of general intelligence, but rather an emergent byproduct of learning. So the fact that a connectionist machine (neural network) got so good at symbolic manipulation actually supports the view that we are closing the gap to general intelligence. Through the rote work, the machine really internalizes those rules and the symbolic manipul…

I am not confused. Because herein these forums, I predicted everything that was going to happen years ago. And the "insane inefficiency" of deep learning is fully to be expected from how it works. As well, there are provably no—literally no—emergent properties in these models. The choice of metric was a convenient, sloppy, and embarrassing fault of the field. It should be discredited; the field should be embarrassed;…

Current LLMs can absolutely multiply floats without a tool call. In fact, that's a much more rote symbol-manipulation task than doing original math research.

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#436
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a lot of people claiming that these recent examples are just trivial combinations of existing prior work. I'm yet to see anyone cite the prior work. If it's true I think some credit is due for the authors Fable/Sol are branching from.

I haven't seen these claims, but all of the open problems that have been solved so far have been in the category of "humans could have solved them, but didn't". This doesn't diminish the significance of the results, but it does mean there's still work for mathematicians to do other than glorified prompt engineers. This specific counterexample really is trivial. There's nothing to cite. People have wasted hours and ho…

Checking the counterexample is a Calc II problem. Finding it was beyond the efforts of the best algebraic geometers for almost a century.

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#437
post #47
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that not like claiming that a "combination of iterative prompts and evaluation with Wolfram Alpha" would produce my Google Mail password? I also have to note that this response abandons the original claim, that the counterexample was found by exhaustively searching prior failed attempts.

I've seen a lot of people claiming that these recent examples are just trivial combinations of existing prior work. I'm yet to see anyone cite the prior work. If it's true I think some credit is due for the authors Fable/Sol are branching from.

It's absolutely not a trivial combination of prior work, or mathematicians would've found it already. This was not an obscure conjecture.

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world doesn’t need advisors like Moh that are bitter enough to gossip about a family funeral.

He's not dead, but it is bad to gossip regardless.

They are referring to Moh's gossip about Zhang's father's funeral in the above (and Zhang's father is very much dead, unfortunately).

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Fable 6 theory is admittedly speculative, but your “[public GPT-5.6] Sol is able to find the same counterexample” is also a jump in conclusions. Aaron specifically says he used “an internal version of Codex”. When asked whether that meant a different model or harness, he dodged the question, and only said the harness should be the standard commercial GPT-ultra harness [0]. He (intentionally) avoids identifying whi…

You are right, I completely missed that, to me internal version of Codex meant the harness, but I was wrong.

Not necessarily, it's plausible that GPT-5.6 Sol could also find this disproof, as neither of us has enough information to make a conclusive case.

Public GPT is certainly capable, it was able to reverse-engineer the counterexample into a short proof: https://x.com/davikrehalt/status/2079175065695035442

I still suspect Fable 6 found the counterexample, mostly because Anthropic has been silent about this achievement. This is a huge accomplishment, and companies don't usually stay quiet when they hit a breakthrough like this. The lack of a press release or blog post is very suspicious.

Re: Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, even Qwen 3.6 27B was able to verify the solution, but I didn't get any glazing for discovering it. Instead, it thought that someone named Shestakov had already found a counterexample in 2004. GLM 5.2 whiffed, it insisted the counterexample wasn't valid. VibeThinker 3B also recognized that the counterexample was valid. But it kept trying to convince itself that it wasn't, over and over, since it's an "…

More anecdata: When I just tried Qwen 3.6 27B (Q6_K_XL) it (ultimately, after a lot of going back and forth) claimed it was not a counterexample and claimed the Jacobian wasn't constant (which I'm guessing is incorrect). It also mentioned a whole bunch of names it attributed the example to, in its thinking trace.

I only asked once, so it might well be inconsistent. I did try asking GLM 5.2 NVFP4 several times, and it returned consistent wrong answers at both thinking and max-thinking levels.

For Qwen 27B, I have better luck with a Heretic-derived 8-bit quant than I did when I was trying to run the various smaller GGUFs.

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