OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics

Re:OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics by geordiew on Friday October 09, 2026 @02:57AM (#50017003)

I am a working mathematician. A problem that I cared about greatly (and probably spent > 3000 hours working on) was on their list. I looked at the paper, and I have to say it is more clearly written than about 30% of the papers I typically referee. I don't want to name poorly written papers, but I agree that "there are plenty of published papers that are just as poorly written as OpenAI's".

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Re:OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics by SilverSlash on Friday October 09, 2026 @03:08AM (#50017089)

And which papers do you typically referee? Without that information this claim is meaningless. For example, if you referee free-for-all papers that today are likely written by LLMs as well then sure I can understand that. But if you referee papers from grad students then that's more concerning.

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Re:OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics by geordiew on Friday October 09, 2026 @04:08AM (#50017502)

I have only twice (knowingly) refereed AI slop. I'm mostly talking about refereeing in the period 2010 - 2020. (However, looking here https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/100-reactions-to-100... it seems that many other consider many of the papers poorly written. I just wanted to give one datapoint.)

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Re:OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics by saalweachter on Friday October 09, 2026 @07:36AM (#50019051)

Random questions--

Were you satisfied with the paper?

Having read the paper, do you understand "what you missed" in those 3000 hours?

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