I read that to say the model's token weights are adjusted as it goes, so in an LLM sense it is kind of learning. It isn't reasoning through an answer in the way a human does though. Meaning, the model is still just statistically predicting what an answer may be and checking if it worked.
I wouldn't chalk that up to learning at all. An AI solving complex math doesn't even seem too impressive to me with the predictive loop approach. Computers are well adept at math, throwing enough compute hardware at it to brute force an answer isn't suprising. I'd be really impressed if it could reliably get there with a similar number of failed attempts as a human, that could indicate that it really learned and reasoned rather than rammed through a mountain of failed guesses.
There's definitely an aspect of this that is 'airplanes, not birds.' Just because the wings don't flap doesn't mean it can't fly, though.
I'd be hard to know how many failed attempts the human made. Humans are constantly thinking of ideas and eliminating them quickly. Possibly to fast to count.
It sounds like AlphaProof will doggedly create full proofs for each idea.
Is what the human is doing testing attempts?
>We trained AlphaProof for the IMO by proving or disproving millions of problems, covering a wide range of difficulties and mathematical topic areas over a period of weeks leading up to the competition. The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found.