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.
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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.