Re:Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI
by eru on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @03:01PM
(#49187380)
> we can however be optimistic, oddly. If you believe Feynman when he says that you can't explain to a child something you don't understand.. then we can see that ChatGPT has no idea of just what it has done!
Why would that be optimistic? Seems like the pessimistic reading to me, if anything. Or are you having a bout of Schadenfreude?
Re:Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI
by oliculipolicula on Thursday August 06, 2026 @07:18PM
(#49203950)
It means that humans can, for now, still do something that chatgpt can't. Distill [proofs. Even if some may hesitate call that understanding.]
Compare the various summaries that humans have written on the Jacobian counterexample, to the chat logs that were archived.
Re:Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI
by eru on Thursday August 06, 2026 @08:36PM
(#49204538)
Have you tried asking ChatGPT / Claude etc for a good summary?
Re:Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI
by oliculipolicula on Friday August 07, 2026 @01:28AM
(#49206209)
Yes. Have you?
I'm not guessing that they aren't working on this aspect or that chatbots won't be able to do it in the futute. It just seems that we do have an advantage for now.
>And then -- the kicker -- something that I personally spent a couple years on in grad school, leading to some of my proudest work: quantum parallel repetition theorems
...
>Is there some broader context or theory within which this would've been the obvious thing to do? What other results can be proven using these techniques? What is it telling us about quantum information or operator theory? I have no idea
https://bsky.app/profile/henryyuen.bsky.social/post/3ms2jpch...
That guy has been featured in quantamag too, btw
I saw another expert on Ehrhart express their bafflement (but I can't find that link now)
PP (actually the "broad career mathematicians" themselves) were being slightly disingenuous... But the specific domain experts seem to be understating how much over their head it actually was. We're in totally unknown territory here..
we can however be optimistic, oddly. If you believe Feynman when he says that you can't explain to a child something you don't understand.. then we can see that ChatGPT has no idea of just what it has done!
(Steel Manning:
1. maybe any chatbot would need 1000x more tokens than were used to arrive at the result to understand it to its own satisfaction.
2. It's possible that Einstein did not fully understand General Relativity