robinhouston

They've just excluded square numbers because (as you noted) the solution is obvious. Except 4, for some reason.

This is the paper that’s being referenced: https://pingyou.com/papers/eleven-squares.pdf

It’s not obvious to me that it has any deep significance.

I really liked Zen Puzzle Garden back in the day. I spent a lot of time playing it when I ought to have been working on my PhD, and I even ended up writing a paper on it. [0]

It’s interesting that Gwern explicitly mentions ZPG as an inferior predecessor, because – for reasons I cannot clearly articulate or explain – I find it much more enjoyable to play than Samon. The player experience feels a lot more polished.

For a while, you could upload your own ZPG garden designs to the Lexaloffle BBS, where they would be playable on the web. I designed a few brutally difficult gardens, which were unsolved for years. Good times.

0. https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.2104

>Terence Tao is arguing

This is a guest post by Amit Sahai.

The original title is ‘Why I agreed to join AGMAI’. I think this is a rare case where HN's auto-declickbaitification has changed the meaning of the headline for the worse.

I’m just looking at it for the first time myself, but isn’t the compiler in https://github.com/bendlang/bend/blob/main/bend2/comp.ts ?

I don't think that's actually the real problem. Along with the progress in answering mathematical questions, recent progress on AI-powered autoformalisation has been astonishing. All the recent AI discoveries have been accompanied by Lean proofs.

And, yes: that doesn't absolutely guarantee correctness. The Lean kernel has had soundness bugs, and may have some still. But it's pretty strong evidence of correctness nevertheless.

The concern among mathematicians is not mainly that they doubt the correctness of any of these discoveries, but that human understanding may be devalued.

For context and balance, Bubeck has tweeted a curiously non-specific denial:

> A series of false and inflammatory allegations against me are currently circulating on social channels. To clarify, I came into the discussion following academic norms, and I'm disappointed that it has come to this. Anyone who knows me knows that academic standards are of the highest importance to me. Will have more to say tomorrow.

I’m pretty sure no one (except perhaps Anthropic insiders who had prior access, and probably not even them) has properly digested this paper yet, and some caution is warranted given the notoriety of this problem and the history of claimed solutions that did not stand up to scrutiny. But if it stands up, it’s a really big deal.

Background: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1973/is-there-a-complex-s...

Funny coincidence: I (who submitted this story) am the second author.

That's true, but submissions are only killed in that way if they receive a ‘fatal’ number of flags. However, flags lower the rank of a story even at non-fatal levels. What antirez is suggesting here is that the rank of this story has been lowered by flags – and that seems plausible, if you compare its rank to that of other stories with a similar age and number of points.

In a way the most remarkable thing about this is that it isn't even at the top of the HN homepage. Even if this is a step up from what we've seen before, we're no longer astonished by the idea that AI can make significant advances in mathematics and computer science.

Thanks! It looks like the viewer app somehow mangled the link I was reading into a link to the whole issue. If a mod sees this, it would be great to use this link instead.

It's unfortunate that they use this ghastly viewer app, but I promise the content is worth it.