Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics

Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by bananaflag on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @04:41AM (#50256159)

I find it a bit ridiculous that they claim three discoveries in "math, CS, physics" when they are basically all pure math (in particular, they all may be formalized in Lean) and only belong to these different disciplines for historical reasons.

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by srdjanr on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @04:49AM (#50256220)

Isn't whole CS basically pure math?

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by bananaflag on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @05:10AM (#50256383)

No, there's a lot of stuff where formal proofs don't make sense or are highly prohibitive.

The flagship case is AI itself, where we rely on benchmarks, not proofs (how could one prove "is good at seducing people").

Something that could have qualified as a "CS discovery" would have been, for example, a SAT or SMT solver that dwarfs in performance any existing one.

Something that could have qualified as a "physics discovery" would have been a new particle. Anyway, something that would come out of experimental data.

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by RugnirViking on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @06:31AM (#50257015)

I understand its hyperbole but are there people seriously trying to benchmark how good ai is at seducing people? lol

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by drstewart on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @06:32AM (#50257023)

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/435/

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by sevenzero on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @04:41AM (#50256164)

So again farming the low hanging fruits for marketing?

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by juliusjh on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @04:50AM (#50256224)

Call these problems "low hanging fruits" may be the understatement of the century.

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by sevenzero on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @04:52AM (#50256249)

If everything of this can be represented in Lean, with enough compute, they are low hanging fruits, yes

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by hkalbasi on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @05:27AM (#50256510)

So maybe everything is now low hanging fruit, with your definition.

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by gimlichgu on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @06:52AM (#50257180)

maybe, or maybe some problems turn out to be reasonably defeatable by educated guess brute forcing with lots of compute and big models pointing the search in reasonable directions.

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by juliusjh on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @07:30AM (#50257549)

Yes, maybe what is hard for LLMs and what is hard for humans have a very small overlap. But calling it brute force or low-hanging fruits is still a bit absurd.

You can safely argue that it's statistics, because by construction it is. But then, maybe nothing is anything more than statistics.

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by saikia81 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @05:28AM (#50256517)

Mathematics is easy if you just brute force the problem domain is not what is happening here

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by hardbass on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @03:50AM (#50270390)

If everything can be represented in a Turing computer or a Fourier Series, does it make it trivial? Are you sure you know the computability power of these representations?

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Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer... by pfdietz on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @08:48AM (#50258332)

Just low-hanging Fields Medal worthy results. Nothing to write home about, right?

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