Thread

1. fruitl00p · 1789638350 · focus · HN ↗

   I thought one of the implicit points of the open letter was that unsolved problems are not something that falls out of the sky, they are a curated resource that people have spent time on and shared for the benefit of like-minded peers and humanity as a whole. And the AI companies treat them like they treat absolutely everything else: natural resources, literature, art, code etc. as something to be chucked into the ravening maw and pooped out the back as profit. They don't care if mathematics advances, they don't care if they strip-mine the available problems and damage the field. In fact, as with programming I think they see that as in their long-term interest - soon there will be no intelligence or creativity but the one that Sam Altman bills you for.

   1. aurareturn · 1789639559 · focus · HN ↗

      I don't understand this logic.

      Ok, so unresolved math problems are often something people discover while trying to solve a different math problem.

      However, math problems are really there to solve a real world problem. We have unlimited real world problems no matter how smart AI gets. Therefore, we will always have unresolved math problems.

      1. tempfile · 1789640859 · focus · HN ↗

         > math problems are really there to solve a real world problem

         I think this is totally wrong. Math problems are almost by definition problems with a particular theory. That theory might be inspired by the real world, but the problem itself is purely theoretical. I can't think of any theoretical problems like this that actually support a practical problem, as opposed to being an internal knot in the theory that indicates something is wrong with it. Not to say that cannot happen - certain optimization problems were historically actually hard to solve and solving them helped us to genuinely optimize a real thing (rather than just explain why the answer we already had was correct, which is much more common). In particular, none of the millennium problems have anything to do with a "real" problem, including the Navier Stokes one.

         1. GPerson · 1789641967 · focus · HN ↗

            Agreed, though for the hn audience I want to advocate a bit for the utility of mathematics. The development of applicable mathematics has often not been through the direct means of solving an open problem. It has however often depended on theory which was developed for the purpose of human understanding. It is difficult to pull concepts out of the aether on demand, but when there is a general milieu of human understanding economic applications can be developed in post.

            I have in mind GPS, cryptography, numerical fluid simulation, lasers, etc…

            1. NonHyloMorph · 1789683141 · focus · HN ↗

               Bioinformatics, the underpinnings of llm's in the theories conceptualizing high dimensional vectorspaces, material sciences, MRT's, signal processing.. don't think one gets far with with calculus only there. Probbly also the inner workings of CPUs and GPU's, CAD-kernels.. Probably there is so much domain specific knowledge that makes use of quite some advanced mathemathesis that most just don't know. The sentiment of "not much more needed then calclus" that appeared in this discussion might be explained by this. Curious if people from some of these or other fields are around that could share some mathematical applications they deal with in their work?

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