Re:"I'm on a War Footing": Terry Tao and the Crisis in Math
by _whoDis on Monday October 19, 2026 @04:17PM
(#50157513)
Hypothetically, if a solution to a problem requires a billion intricate steps there is no way for humans to comprehend it. Human life span is too short. We can't even grasp what it entails. If a machine can pump out humongous proofs and solutions on a regular basis we will never catch up.
Re:"I'm on a War Footing": Terry Tao and the Crisis in Math
by glimshe on Monday October 19, 2026 @05:54PM
(#50158621)
I'll add to it. The classic answer to your objection is "but as a species we'd have sooner or latter 1 billion steps worth of intellectual capital". Today someone gets to an intermediate result worth 1 million steps, tomorrow another million and so on.
But there's no guarantee that such "low IQ" intermediate steps exist. We do well with many classes of problems because of divide-and-conquer. But not all problems can be solved through divide-and-conquer.
For a rough analogy, see how AI plays chess and intermediate board positions often don't make sense to us. Imagine now an enormous chess-like game played in an enormous chess board where a match lasts longer than a lifetime and none of the intermediate steps make sense to any human.
I see no reason whatsoever to expect that humans have any kind of limit to what we can understand as a species. We've had more unthinkable and incomprehensible discoveries than anyone cares to count. They become understood, normalized, and folded into our scientific canon. We went from inventing airplanes to landing on the moon in a matter of decades. We went from banging rocks together to quantum physics and string theory. I think we'll be alright.