Thread

1. lacker · 1789688599 · focus · HN ↗

   I have seen two worries recently:

   1. People will publish so much frontier mathematics, humans won't be able to understand it all

   2. Frontier mathematics will all be kept secret

   Fortunately, these seem like they can't both happen at once.

   1. oersted · 1789711137 · focus · HN ↗

      There are many conjectures that we know are almost surely true, but we don't know why, and explaining why is the main purpose of the mathematician when publishing a proof.

      The fact that we don't know why is a clue pointing at some area of math that we haven't discovered yet. The hope is always that it will uncover some hidden fertile valley that will lead to lots of new discoveries. But the proof of the conjecture itself, without understanding, is really not that valuable.

      My point is that even if AI discovers many new truths, there's still plenty to do for the mathematical community, in dissecting it and building useful abstractions to understand it, abstractions that can be leveraged for further exploration and uncovering new questions.

      1. veunes · 1789715290 · focus · HN ↗

         This seems right as long as the AI output is legible enough to reverse-engineer

         1. mitxela · 1789730097 · focus · HN ↗

            And especially when it isn't. Reading uncomplicated unobfuscated Python is easy, but the people who reverse-engineer Denuvo or Nvidia GPUs are gods.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.