11 ms·
> no prior solutions found. This is no longer true, a prior solution has just been found[1], so the LLM proof has been moved to the Section 2 of Terence Tao's
by xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9mo ago
> no prior solutions found.
This is no longer true, a prior solution has just been found[1], so the LLM proof has been moved to the Section 2 of Terence Tao's wiki[2].
[1] - https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/281#post-3325 https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/281#post-3325
[2] - https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contributions-to-Erd%C5%91s-problems#2-fully-ai-generated-solutions-to-problems-for-which-subsequent-literature-review-found-full-or-partial-solutions https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution...
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago[flagged]
- nurettin 9mo agoWhy not plan for a future where a lot of non-trivial tasks are automated instead of living on the edge with all this anxiety?
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago[flagged]
- 7777332215 9mo agoIf all of it is going away and you should deny reality, what does everything else you wrote even mean?
- habinero 9mo agoYes, it is simply impossible that anyone could look at things and do your own evaluations and come to a different, much more skeptical conclusion. The only possible explanation is people say things they don't believe out of FUD. Literally the only one.
- undeveloper 9mo agocome out of the irony layer for a second -- what do you believe about LLMs?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jorvi 9mo agoI mean.. LLMs have hit a pretty hard wall a while ago, with the only solution being throwing monstrous compute at eking out the remaining few percent improvement (real world, not benchmarks). That's not to mention hallucinations / false paths being a foundational problem. LLMs will continue to get slightly better in the next few years, but mainly a lot more efficient. Which will also mean better and better local models. And grounding might get better, but that just means less wrong answers, not better right answers. So no need for doomerism. The people saying LLMs are a few years away from eating the world are either in on the con or unaware.
- johnfn 9mo agoI suspect this is AI generated, but it’s quite high quality, and doesn’t have any of the telltale signs that most AI generated content does. How did you generate this? It’s great.
- CamperBob2 9mo agoIt's bizarre. The same account was previously arguing in favor of emergent reasoning abilities in another thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453084 ) -- I voted it up, in fact! Turing test failed, I guess. (edit: fixed link)
- habinero 9mo agoWe need a name for the much more trivial version of the Turing test that replaces "human" with "weird dude with rambling ideas he clearly thinks are very deep" I'm pretty sure it's like "can it run DOOM" and someone could make an LLM that passes this that runs on an pregnancy test
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoI thought the mockery and sarcasm in my piece was rather obvious.
- CamperBob2 9mo agoPoe's Law is the real Bitter Lesson.
- CamperBob2 9mo ago(edit: removed duplicate comment from above, not sure how that happened)
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoIt's a formal sarcasm piece.
- 9mo ago
- magnio 9mo agoPity that HN's ability to detect sarcasm is as robust as that of a sentiment analysis model using keyword-matching.
- furyofantares 9mo agoThe problem is more that it's an LLM-generated comment that's about 20x as long as it needed to be to get the point across.
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoIt's not. Evidence shows otherwise: Despite the "20x" length, many people actually missed the point.
- eru 9mo agoDespite or because?
- _diyar 9mo agoI definitely missed the point because of the length, and only realized after I read replies to your comment.
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoNext time I'll write something shorter, or if you don't believe I wrote it... then I'll tell the AI to write something shorter.
- quinnjh 9mo agoIts not just verbose—it's almost a novel. Parent either cooked and capped, or has managed to perfectly emulate the patterns this parrot is stochastically known best for. I liked the pro human vibe if anything.
- furyofantares 9mo agoOh yeah, there is also a problem with people not noticing they're reading LLM output, AND with people missing sarcasm on here. Actually, I'm OK with people missing sarcasm on here - I have plenty of places to go for sarcasm and wit and it's actually kind of nice to have a place where most posts are sincere, even if that sets people up to miss it when posts are sarcastic. Which is also what makes it problematic that you're lying about your LLM use. I would honestly love to know your prompt and how you iterated on the post, how much you put into it and how much you edited or iterated. Although pretending there was no LLM involved at all is rather disappointing. Unfortunately I think you might feel backed into a corner now that you've insisted otherwise but it's a genuinely interesting thing here that I wish you'd elaborate on.
- eru 9mo ago> This is a relief, honestly. A prior solution exists now, which means the model didn’t solve anything at all. It just regurgitated it from the internet, which we can retroactively assume contained the solution in spirit, if not in any searchable or known form. Mystery resolved. Vs > Interesting that in Terrance Tao's words: "though the new proof is still rather different from the literature proof)"
- catoc 9mo agoI firmly believe @threethirtytwo’s reply was not produced by an LLM
- mkarliner 9mo agoregardless of if this text was written by an LLM or a human, it is still slop,with a human behind it just trying to wind people up . If there is a valid point to be made , it should be made, briefly.
- catoc 9mo agoIf the point was triggering a reply, the length and sarcasm certainly worked. I agree brevity is always preferred. Making a good point while keeping it brief is much harder than rambling on. But length is just a measure, quality determines if I keep reading. If a comment is too long, I won’t finish reading it. If I kept reading, it wasn’t too long.
- rixed 9mo agoAre you expecting people who can't detect self-dellusions to be able to detect sarcasm, or are you just being cruel?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- nl 9mo agoInteresting that in Terrance Tao's words: "though the new proof is still rather different from the literature proof)" And even odder that the proof was by Erdos himself and yet he listed it as an open problem!
- TZubiri 9mo agoMaybe it was in the training set.
- magneticnorth 9mo agoI think that was Tao's point, that the new proof was not just read out of the training set.
- rzmmm 9mo agoThe model has multiple layers of mechanisms to prevent carbon copy output of the training data.
- TZubiri 9mo agoforgive the skepticism, but this translates directly to "we asked the model pretty please not to do it in the system prompt"
- ffsm8 9mo agoIt's mind boggling if you think about the fact they're essential "just" statistical models It really contextualizes the old wisdom of Pythagoras that everything can be represented as numbers / math is the ultimate truth
- GrowingSideways 9mo agoHow so? Truth is naturally an apriori concept; you don't need a chatbot to reach this conclusion.
- cubefox 9mo agoThis illustrates how unimportant this problem is. A prior solution did exist, but apparently nobody knew because people didn't really care about it. If progress can be had by simply searching for old solutions in the literature, then that's good evidence the supposed progress is imaginary. And this is not the first time this has happened with an Erdős problem. A lot of pure mathematics seems to consist in solving neat logic puzzles without any intrinsic importance. Recreational puzzles for very intelligent people. Or LLMs.
- MattGaiser 9mo agoThere is still enormous value in cleaning up the long tail of somewhat important stuff. One of the great benefits of Claude Code to me is that smaller issues no longer rot in backlogs, but can be at least attempted immediately.
- cubefox 9mo agoThe difference is that Claude Code actually solves practical problems, but pure (as opposed to applied) mathematics doesn't. Moreover, a lot of pure mathematics seems to be not just useless, but also without intrinsic epistemic value, unlike science. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510353
- amazingman 9mo agoIt's unclear to me what point you are making.
- jstanley 9mo agoApplications for pure mathematics can't necessarily be known until the underlying mathematics is solved. Just because we can't imagine applications today doesn't mean there won't be applications in the future which depend on discoveries that are made today.
- cubefox 9mo ago
- davidhs 9mo agoIt looks like these models work pretty well as natural language search engines and at connecting together dots of disparate things humans haven't done.
- pfdietz 9mo agoThey're finding them very effective at literature search, and at autoformalization of human-written proofs. Pretty soon, this is going to mean the entire historical math literature will be formalized (or, in some cases, found to be in error). Consider the implications of that for training theorem provers.
- mlpoknbji 9mo agoI think "pretty soon" is a serious overstatement. This does not take into account the difficulty in formalizing definitions and theorem statements. This cannot be done autonomously (or, it can, but there will be serious errors) since there is no way to formalize the "text to lean" process. What's more, there's almost surely going to turn out to be a large amount of human generated mathematics that's "basically" correct, in the sense that there exists a formal proof that morally fits the arc of the human proof, but there's informal/vague reasoning used (e.g. diagram arguments, etc) that are hard to really formalize, but an expert can use consistently without making a mistake. This will take a long time to formalize, and I expect will require a large amount of human and AI effort.
- pfdietz 9mo agoIt's all up for debate, but personally I feel you're being too pessimistic there. The advances being made are faster than I had expected. The area is one where success will build upon and accelerate success, so I expect the rate of advance to increase and continue increasing. This particular field seems ideal for AI, since verification enables identification of failure at all levels. If the definitions are wrong the theorems won't work and applications elsewhere won't work.
- p-e-w 9mo agoEvery time this topic comes up people compare the LLM to a search engine of some kind. But as far as we know, the proof it wrote is original. Tao himself noted that it’s very different from the other proof (which was only found now). That’s so far removed from a “search engine” that the term is essentially nonsense in this context.