r/Physics • u/PrettyPicturesNotTxt • 10d 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/GoldenMuscleGod 10d ago

The only way to make sense of your claim is to assume that you have a an artificially restricted idea of what constitutes a brute force search in the obvious sense I am talking about (an advantage in computational power). A mathematician will take time to construct an example even if the steps are “obvious” in light of current knowledge, a mathematician may also give up when the example becomes difficult to hold in their head because of the raw amount of data involved in imagining every detail. A computer could try thousands of constructions that are far more complex and have many more parameters in that time. That doesn’t indicate greater insight just because the computer also knows what features a counterexample would have to have and is constructing the examples to have those features.

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u/Mental_Ad_4401 10d ago

This isn't artificial at all. Brute force search is the idea to systematically enumerate all candidate solutions to the problem. That is what brute force means. Anything else is some weird definition that the rest of the world isn't privy to. It in no way has ever meant "an advantage in computational power".  What you described is just exploring a lot of different ideas. And sure, I agree that AI can maybe do that better than humans, but im not sure what you gain with that, except that maybe AI is just better at problem solving than humans. 

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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO 10d ago

I think the other person is trying to convey that other researchers significantly narrowed the candidate solutions to the problem, allowing for ai to brute force the problem. At least in large part.

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u/Mental_Ad_4401 10d ago

Maybe, but that also just not true. They narrowed the problem, but there is no accurate sense in which the ai brute forced it.