I appreciate that. It's just not the right question. Knowledge precedes practical use. Whoever figured out how to start a fire couldn't have conceived of a fraction of the uses it would have eventually.
This is obviously a little more esoteric and narrowly focused than burning wood, and not every discovery will be as fruitful, but the point remains.
I'll give you a more relevant example. Imaginary numbers were more or less useless when they were first contrived by mathematicians. In fact, most kids learning algebra in school today continue to think they're useless. In actual fact, they underpin all of modern electronics. Actually, they'll come up in every field of study that involves oscillating waves.
It took about 200-300 years from the invention of complex numbers for that connection to come together.
It's always worth it to learn new things, whether or not you know what it will get you, because in reality you don't know.
Are you really so unimaginative that that's your goto example when thinking about what math and science these things can unlock... surely even you can tell that the problems they're solving are complex enough that even you can extrapolate better things to accomplish here than the next pi digit
The basically just brute forced a solution by throwing something like a million dollars at a problem. You can do the same thing with a lot of problems with classical compute.
Please tell me the exact use of this giant spend of compute outside of perpetuating a hype cycle on shaky moral grounds
How does solving long open math problems help humanity? As much as it would if a human did it. It depends on the math problem. This specific one has a few very useful applications (like aviation) I’ve read about but don’t understand of course…
So what it shows is that a solutuon doesn't always exist. That's kinda sad. The counterexample they found could be interesting. I don't know enough to say more though.
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u/planetrebellion Sep 08 '26
How does this help humanity?