How I learned to love and fear the Riemann Hypothesis

Re:How I learned to love and fear the Riemann Hypothesis by idolaspecus on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @12:20PM (#25647873)

Your comment inspired an interesting (to me at least) thought. I'm imagining a world where mathematics becomes too advanced for even the brightest human being, but progress is preserved by proof-generating programs running in data centers. The data centers churn out exabytes of mathematical proofs, and humanity employs an army of what are effectively philologists/semioticians to dissect, mine, and excavate these proofs for meaning.

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Re:How I learned to love and fear the Riemann Hypothesis by brzozowski on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @04:08PM (#25651074)

And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can’t understand their analysis and you can’t verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith—Or you use information theory to flatten it for you, to squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into three, to simplify reality and pray to whatever Gods survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn’t ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons. You hire people like me; the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists…

In formal settings you’d call me Synthesist.

—Peter Watts, Blindsight (2006)

[1]: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

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Re:How I learned to love and fear the Riemann Hypothesis by dwohnitmok on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @03:31PM (#25650627)

Ted Chiang has a (very) short story exploring this idea, with metahumans replacing data centers here: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679

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Re:How I learned to love and fear the Riemann Hypothesis by agar on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @05:33PM (#25652148)

Thank you for that link. A very interesting story, with surprising philosophical depth given its brevity.

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