People keep talking about this like there's a finite amount of math to be done, and then the party's over. But that's never how math has worked, is it? Every problem you solve, ten new ones open up. Like a fractal, the more you zoom in, the more detail emerges. No matter how much better AI is at solving problems, it's not going to generate the "final, complete compendium of mathematics" that that seems to hover over this post.
Math is meaningful because ... some people like to do it. The same as any other human pursuit. It doesn't need a reason beyond that. And AI won't change that. There will continue to be things to explore, things to find out, things that are maybe just at the edge of AI's reach and needs a human to decide whether it's worth continuing to explore or not. (Remember, AI isn't free).
So, IDK, I think for people who enjoy exploring math, there will always be interesting areas to explore. AI just gives us a better flashlight.
BTW I do agree that there's going to be an incident soon, whether intentional, accidental, or paperclip-factory, that leads governments around the world to shut all this down for some time, perhaps even shutting off access to GPUs entirely. It seems unavoidable. But that's just a temporary respite and skirts the core philosophical premise of the post.
Trivially false. Let P be the set of maths problems and I be the interesting subset of P. If I is finite, then there exists an element x belonging to P\I whose description is minimal among P\I. Then x is interesting. QED.
I think that's a variation on the interesting numbers paradox joke.
Statement: All numbers are interesting.
Proof: Assume by contradiction that there's a non-empty set of uninteresting numbers. Then that set contains the smallest uninteresting number. That property makes it interesting.
Yeah, I've seen this before as well. I guess I've just become old and grumpy and can't appreciate jokes like these anymore. Also taking jokes seriously is peak HN so..
Edit: actually, forget about the above. I just find it very annoying when people dismiss good conversations with not-so-good jokes.
I mean, there's some truth to that joke in this case, so I wouldn't agree that it's dismissing. The point of it is that what matters is how we define "interesting", because by the joke's definition in particular, there can't be uninteresting problems. That seems to be a very subjective concept that can also change with time. Mathematics is so specialized that there can be 3 people in the world who find one specific problem interesting. If they solve it, they'll move on to something else.
I find it curious that you've protested against that joke but not against the statement that "it seems likely that there's a finite number of interesting math problems". It doesn't seem likely to me personally and I haven't seen proof of that, even in a joke form. There's a finite number of problems at any given time, obviously, because mathematicians are finite, but it would require a very good understanding of the whole of our mathematical knowledge to declare that if we keep expanding it we'll hit some kind of wall, of "interestingness" or whatever else.
Firstly, I'm very happy we're having this conversation. It's so pointless, yet pedantic it warms my heart in the best way possible.
Secondly, I stand by the statement that there is no merit to this joke. This is because the way it defines interesting is very hand-wavy. There are interesting and non-interesting problems, but by a sleigh of hand you can turn the non-interesting problems interesting, thus proving that basically everything in the universe is interesting. At least in the mathematically describable universe. When everything is interesting, nothing is interesting. So we can dismiss the proof as a silly joke.
What mathematicians find interesting is a different story. However, we can almost certainly say there is only a finite number of problems mathematicians as physical beings can solve. If we have 200 mathematical symbols at our disposal, and we consider all strings of these symbols of length 1000,000, we have captured all the descriptions of problems that fit to 1M symbols. But that's a finite number. Going beyond that starts to be difficult for a human to grasp (if 1M is not too much already), so all mathematical problems that are solvable by a physical mathematician are in that set of strings. And that's not even saying anything about whether or not they're interesting..
I still don't quite agree with the approach to mathematics as enumerating problems of a certain size, but to be honest I'm not prepared or motivated to keep this conversation going without turning to handwavy arguments based on my imperfect idea of what mathematics is and how it works. However, it's certainly given me something to think about, so it hasn't been completely pointless. Thank you for the discussion.
By the way, if I'm not completely mistaken, Gödel's argument to show the incompleteness of mathematics relies on encoding all mathematical statements as numbers. So I'm certainly not being very original here.
FWIW I think the concept of "interesting" is so subjective, time-dependent, and nebulous, that to say there's "only a finite number of interesting" mathematics problems feels absurd to me. What's interesting in ten years time will depend on what other interesting things have been discovered in the intervening time. But you're right, I shouldn't have responded with a cheap joke.
Godel's incompleteness theorem technically relates to individual axiomatic theories (i.e. the set of facts that logically derive from a given set of axioms). The numerical encoding you refer to applies to logical statements within that theory. Arguably, the kind of mathematics that humans do is not constrained to a single theory, but is a more general form of reasoning that is often flexible about which axioms may or may not be assumed.
daxfohl · · focus · HN ↗
Math is meaningful because ... some people like to do it. The same as any other human pursuit. It doesn't need a reason beyond that. And AI won't change that. There will continue to be things to explore, things to find out, things that are maybe just at the edge of AI's reach and needs a human to decide whether it's worth continuing to explore or not. (Remember, AI isn't free).
So, IDK, I think for people who enjoy exploring math, there will always be interesting areas to explore. AI just gives us a better flashlight.
BTW I do agree that there's going to be an incident soon, whether intentional, accidental, or paperclip-factory, that leads governments around the world to shut all this down for some time, perhaps even shutting off access to GPUs entirely. It seems unavoidable. But that's just a temporary respite and skirts the core philosophical premise of the post.
itishappy · · focus · HN ↗
n4r9 · · focus · HN ↗
karmakurtisaani · · focus · HN ↗
renyicircle · · focus · HN ↗
karmakurtisaani · · focus · HN ↗
Edit: actually, forget about the above. I just find it very annoying when people dismiss good conversations with not-so-good jokes.
renyicircle · · focus · HN ↗
I find it curious that you've protested against that joke but not against the statement that "it seems likely that there's a finite number of interesting math problems". It doesn't seem likely to me personally and I haven't seen proof of that, even in a joke form. There's a finite number of problems at any given time, obviously, because mathematicians are finite, but it would require a very good understanding of the whole of our mathematical knowledge to declare that if we keep expanding it we'll hit some kind of wall, of "interestingness" or whatever else.
karmakurtisaani · · focus · HN ↗
Secondly, I stand by the statement that there is no merit to this joke. This is because the way it defines interesting is very hand-wavy. There are interesting and non-interesting problems, but by a sleigh of hand you can turn the non-interesting problems interesting, thus proving that basically everything in the universe is interesting. At least in the mathematically describable universe. When everything is interesting, nothing is interesting. So we can dismiss the proof as a silly joke.
What mathematicians find interesting is a different story. However, we can almost certainly say there is only a finite number of problems mathematicians as physical beings can solve. If we have 200 mathematical symbols at our disposal, and we consider all strings of these symbols of length 1000,000, we have captured all the descriptions of problems that fit to 1M symbols. But that's a finite number. Going beyond that starts to be difficult for a human to grasp (if 1M is not too much already), so all mathematical problems that are solvable by a physical mathematician are in that set of strings. And that's not even saying anything about whether or not they're interesting..
renyicircle · · focus · HN ↗
karmakurtisaani · · focus · HN ↗
By the way, if I'm not completely mistaken, Gödel's argument to show the incompleteness of mathematics relies on encoding all mathematical statements as numbers. So I'm certainly not being very original here.
n4r9 · · focus · HN ↗
Godel's incompleteness theorem technically relates to individual axiomatic theories (i.e. the set of facts that logically derive from a given set of axioms). The numerical encoding you refer to applies to logical statements within that theory. Arguably, the kind of mathematics that humans do is not constrained to a single theory, but is a more general form of reasoning that is often flexible about which axioms may or may not be assumed.