Are you running tool calls that include inference with local fine tunes? And fast math packages? Controlled by the frontier model agents?
Is there a way folks can contribute to this?
1) As far as the AI models go, we used GPT 5.6 Sol, Fable 5, and Gemini-2-embeddings across the system
2) Yes, the agents are given bash tools that allows them to interact with the preinstalled mathematics packages/dependencies that are on the VMs
3) This was a setup as a relatively quick project without much thought for future contributions, I will spend some time thinking about how i could make it more open.
I hate to bother with more questions, but I'm just so curious about this.
If you could roughly sketch out your agentic harness loop in a sentence or two, what does it look like? Which model(s) do the driving? How is progress measured?
What's your daily/monthly budget for this look like, if you don't mind my asking?
I also had this sort of thoughts when finishing my master's degree. I guess what breaks the cycle is that proofs (like other artefacts in other human activities) deliver aesthetic bliss.
But even then your argument breaks down when you consider more complicated cryptographic structures.
Well, programmers couldn't devise such a method either. You seem to assume that mathematicians are better than them at finding efficient algorithms, which isn't very plausible.
> But even then your argument breaks down when you consider more complicated cryptographic structures.
Even if help of mathematics is needed there, applied — rather than pure — math might still be sufficient.
And surely you don't mean all pure math, so your argument ends up being circular --- useless math is useless. You happen to think that this math is useless, but you might be, or turn out to be, wrong.
Also, you're misusing the term "self-referential". You seem to mean that it's a closed system ... but it's not, since mathematicians interact with it.
Finally: so what? We do all sorts of enjoyable activities with no benefit other than the enjoyment. Solving Erdős problems seems at least as justifiable as finding the trillionth digit of pi or writing an Apple ][ emulator in Brainfuck or playing those video games that you demonize by calling them addictive. (Compare to, say, compulsively reading Britannica's The Great Books of the Western World ... it's snooty judgments all the way down.)
Postscript to finally: This framework has wider application ... it's not limited to Erdős problems or anything else that someone happens to consider to be useless.
I don't think that's true for a reasonable interpretation of "often". I'm pretty sure the vast majority of pure math research is and remains useless.
> Also, you're misusing the term "self-referential". You seem to mean that it's a closed system ... but it's not, since mathematicians interact with it.
Then which better term do you propose? The point was that its subject matter lies within itself, which is very different from science and philosophy.
> so your argument ends up being circular --- useless math is useless.
It's not circular: You can replace "pure" with "useless" and the argument stays the same. I contrasted useless math with useless science and useless philosophy for a reason.
> Finally: so what?
I'll just point out that "so what" is not a counterargument. If you agree with my point but find it unimportant: that's fine with me.
> Solving Erdős problems seems at least as justifiable as finding the trillionth digit of pi or writing an Apple ][ emulator in Brainfuck or playing those video games that you demonize by calling them addictive.
The difference between achieving a new record for a video game, and pure math research, is that nobody is confused about what the former is: It's a game, or a sport. Speed runners or chess champions or pi digit calculators don't confuse themselves with noble researchers advancing the frontier of human knowledge.
> I'll just point out that "so what" is not a counterargument.
It really is.
> Speed runners or chess champions or pi digit calculators don't confuse themselves with noble researchers advancing the frontier of human knowledge.
Yow.
Second, the proofs -- I understand the Lean 4 proofs to be refereed by Fable, and generated by Chat 5.6 Sol. Unlike the leaked proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture last week which had a very nicely readable nearly humanlike writeup, the proof summaries (from Fable) read like Claude tends to read to me these days - real difficulty with the theory of mind of the reader, they are filled with technical phrases, acknowledgment of hard bits and oblique reference to solutions. In short, they suck. I didn't see the word load-bearing, but I bet it's there.
That said, a Lean 4 proof is a pretty compelling output artifact. I find it interesting that it's an additional type of effort to turn these into human readable / appreciable / beautiful / non-shitty proofs.
To those who say who cares -- indeed. But. One of the major reasons things like the Erdos problems are valuable is that they can at times spur new techniques and concepts. The best of these concepts are applied elsewhere, advancing the frontier. While we gain a lot from solving these problems, we'll gain even more from that next step of distillation / explanation into something humans and computers can grok together. I'd hope that with so many tentatively marked 'solved' we will see some new techniques / ontology / concepts. If not, still pretty amazing.