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Terry Tao has found them helpful in the past[0], and I’d trust him over Hamkins. [0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/the-story-of-erdos-problem-126/
by MaysonL 9mo ago
Terry Tao has found them helpful in the past[0], and I’d trust him over Hamkins.
[0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/the-story-of-erdos-problem-126/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/the-story-of-erdos...
- measurablefunc 9mo agoThey do different kinds of mathematics. Tao works mainly in analytic number theory & that's why he got a Fields medal. Hamkins works in foundations of mathematics, logic, & computability theory.
- pfdietz 9mo agoTao has also used "Good Old Fashioned AI" (in the form of Mace4/Prover9) for math research. https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/the-equational-theories-project-advancing-collaborative-mathematical-research-at-scale/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/the-equational-the...
- watchthedemo 9mo agoFor the sake of rigor it appears he found it interesting that someone else found them helpful in the past rather than "Terry Tao[himself] has found them helpful in the past." > This was one further addition to a recent sequence of examples where an Erdős problem had been automatically solved in one fashion or another by an AI tool.[Aristotle] Like the previous cases, the proof turned out to not be particularly novel He concludes: > One striking feature of this story for me is how important it was to have a diverse set of people, literature, and tools to attack this problem. To be able to state and prove the precise formula for {c(n)} required multiple observations Which looks like he wants to focus the praise for the solution on the "diverse set of people" relegating any "praise" for LLMs to the obfuscated and ambiguous category of "tools" behind literature.
- sph 9mo agoIsaac Newton was deep into alchemy and occult. Even very smart people suffer from confirmation bias, Dunning-Kruger effect & co.