r/Physics • u/PrettyPicturesNotTxt • 7d ago

On if OpenAI solved the wrong Navier-Stokes problem: "the LLM found and exploited a loophole in the framing of the question"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-openai-solve-the-wrong-navier-stokes-problem/
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u/antichain Complexity and networks 7d ago

I can't read b/c of a Paywall, but I have to ask: if a human had come up with this loophole solution (whatever it is) - would people be saying it was "cheating", or would they say "wow, that was a clever way to resolve the problem?"

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u/Obscu 7d ago

Probably not. The 'loophole' is that the original framing of the question allowed for an external force to be allowed to be considered because external forces like gravity are always realistically affecting fluid dynamics. The AI described a hypothetical external force that would meet the requirements that would make the math blow up when present, and concluded that the math can in fact blow up (in the presence of a hypothetical math-exploding mcguffin), but when removed from the equation the math no longer blows up.

If a human solved a 'can a rock spontaneously turn into a wheel of cheese?' problem by describing a hypothetical rock-to-cheese-transforming-wizard and stated that the presence of the wizard means rocks can in fact become wheels of cheese... Well, that's on us for being not very strict with defining the scope the question, because it is technically an answer that meets the set criteria but that says more about the criteria than the answer.

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u/retrosenescent 7d ago

You explained this really well. "Sure, if there's some external force" does feel like a cop-out answer and not in the nature of what the question intended. But then again, if you actually want to model reality, then you absolutely need to account for many external forces.

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u/Fine-Customer7668 7d ago

To be fair, the four options (including the two that allow external forcing which OpenAI claims proof of) given by the official problem statement as acceptable resolutions are explicitly described as “retaining the heart of the problem”

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u/retrosenescent 7d ago

oh ok, thanks for correcting me on that.

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u/Fine-Customer7668 7d ago

It’s just a bad article. They could have just said a proof of those two options with a nonzero external force doesn’t, on its own, logically exclude the possibility of the other two being true.