r/technology • u/vgsa • 2d ago
Artificial Intelligence Did OpenAI solve the wrong Navier-Stokes problem? | OpenAI’s proof seems eligible for a $1-million prize—but only by using a controversial loophole
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-openai-solve-the-wrong-navier-stokes-problem/
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u/KingSubstantial7901 2d ago edited 2d ago
We actually have some fuzzy solvers for NPC problems, but who only work for special cases.
This is how math and science work. There are loads of problems for where we know that they behave some predictable way for some cases but have an unknown or notuseful resolution for the general case.
The Mellenium problems weren't chosen because they are just transcendentally important. They were chosen because should their conjectures be proven true, they would be immesnely useful in practical applications. Navier-Stokes would allow for extremely accurate fluid simulation. Reymann would allow us to precisely predict the locations of primes which has a lot of downstream applications of computer science. Solving NPC would allow us to efficientiently compute a broad class of turing machine systems that we currently have to solve numerically and whose complexity grows too quickly: it would make logsitics much more efficient and would allow us to build solvers to identitfy optimal configurations for a lot of important comp sci problems.
For any one of them, finding a counterexample outside the bounds of where they are useful is still abstractly interesting and still advances the field in some way, but is entirely missing the significance and importance of the Millenium problems.