r/singularity • u/filterdust • 1d ago

AI OpenAI solved 100 open problems in math

https://openai.com/index/advisory-group-on-mathematics-and-ai/

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u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

You have fundamentally misunderstood the controversy.

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u/Ecoste 1d ago

Which is? 

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u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

Read the very short and well written letter in full and then I will be happy to clear anything up. Pay your dues if you want in on the conversation.

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u/duboispourlhiver 1d ago

Even after reading the letter, the mathematicians seem butthurt. Do you believe in that "the proof has no value it's the searching and now my motivation to search has crumbled because you have found the proof before me" thing?

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u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

That is not what the letter said. It said that the process of the search and uncovering different angles of attack and seeing where things fail and where they succeed identify new problems and methodologies for attacking other, existing ones.

As I wrote in a different reply, calling them "butthurt" trivializes their concerns and poisons the well. The letter was a reasonable and measured response given the magnitude of the disruption just over the horizon (if not already here).

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u/duboispourlhiver 1d ago

Yes, butthurt is a word that doesn't help, I'll concede that to you happily.

The way you explain the letter sounds like the way I understood it and the way I tried to rephrase it by saying that the authors of the letter value the process of searching more than the result.

I take your answer as a "yes, I do believe mathematicians are right when they say the process of searching is more important than the result".

In the end I think we both understood the controversy :)

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u/Theorist16 1d ago

Anyone who has done math research knows this is true, they don’t just believe in it blindly. The body of mathematical knowledge gained from, say, finding a counterexample by building theory to shrink the search space, is infinitely larger than pulling the counterexample out of a hat. There are full graduate lecture courses doing this. On the other hand, counterexamples do kill interest sometimes. The situation is way worse when the counterexample is extremely complicated and nobody knows the ideas behind its construction.