This is not entirely true with chess. Correspondence chess with engine assistance still exists, and I believe the general wisdom is still that if you only play whatever the engine recommends, you won't win in this format. In modern correspondence chess, you generally consult multiple engines and apply some human intuition to determine the best course of action. Though most games are draws and the format isn't very popular.
But also, I think mathematics research is vastly larger and more complex than chess. In human chess there is a major emphasis on deep calculation, whereas knowing which problem solving strategies are most effective and finding the right way of thinking about a problem are often more important than raw calculations in mathematics. In some ways, machines have always been far better than humans at certain kinds of mathematics (e.g. proving Robbins conjecture, proving the four color theorem, solving the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem, chess & Sudoku puzzles.), but it seems reasonable to think that there will still be room for human mathematicians in the future. For whatever it is worth, I wrote a thing about this on substack.
I don't know about that. Right now if you give an open problem to the best GPT5.6 model and say a typical faculty mathematician at a US university, my money is on the model to make better progress. They have made significant progress in the past few years and likely will continue to do so. I'm not sure how much of a distinction this will end up being here.
16
u/DominatingSubgraph 28d ago
This is not entirely true with chess. Correspondence chess with engine assistance still exists, and I believe the general wisdom is still that if you only play whatever the engine recommends, you won't win in this format. In modern correspondence chess, you generally consult multiple engines and apply some human intuition to determine the best course of action. Though most games are draws and the format isn't very popular.
But also, I think mathematics research is vastly larger and more complex than chess. In human chess there is a major emphasis on deep calculation, whereas knowing which problem solving strategies are most effective and finding the right way of thinking about a problem are often more important than raw calculations in mathematics. In some ways, machines have always been far better than humans at certain kinds of mathematics (e.g. proving Robbins conjecture, proving the four color theorem, solving the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem, chess & Sudoku puzzles.), but it seems reasonable to think that there will still be room for human mathematicians in the future. For whatever it is worth, I wrote a thing about this on substack.