The AI revolution in math has arrived

claysmithr

I wonder when AI will be able to discern the passage of time

themafia

There are several high value prizes for mathematical research. Let me know when an "AI" has earned one of them. Otherwise: > When Ryu asked ChatGPT, “it kept giving me incorrect proofs,” [...] he would check its answers, keep the correct parts, and feed them back into the model So you had a conversational calculator being operated by an actual domain expert. > With ChatGPT, I felt like I was covering a lot of ground very rapidly There's no way to convert that feeling into a measurement of any actual value and we happen to know that domain experts are surprisingly easy to fool when outside of their own domains.

dogscatstrees

> As they did so, they also learned how to improve the prompts they gave AlphaEvolve. One key takeaway: The model seemed to benefit from encouragement. It worked better “when we were prompting with some positive reinforcement to the LLM,” Gómez-Serrano said. “Like saying ‘You can do this’ — this seemed to help. This is interesting. We don’t know why.” Four top logical people in the world are acknowledging this. It is mind-blowing and we don't know why.

norejisace

Interesting development. It feels like AI is getting much better at symbolic reasoning, not just pattern recognition.

sm0ss117

Mathematics seems like the ideal candidate for AIs to achieve absurd results. It's a purely abstract grammar with true auto-verifiability. Even SWE has the requirement of interacting with real physical things. In math there's no external feedback required, you're solely bounded by the rate and quality of token generation.

bgirard

Last week I got together with my math alumni friend. We cracked some beers, we chatted with voice mode ChatGPT and toyed around with Collatz Conjecture and we sent some prompt to a coding agent to build visualizations and simulation. It was a lot of fun directing these agents while we bounced off ideas and the models could explore them. I think with the right problem and the right agentic loop it’s clear to me improvements will speed up.

yabutlivnWoods

We can define a Dyson Sphere in math. We cannot build one. AI outputting axiomatically valid syntax isn't going to be all that useful. It's possible to generate all axiomatically correct math with a for loop until the machine OOMs Physics is not math and math is not physics.

viccis

What is the telos for AI chewing around the edges of pure math problems? Does AI care about math?

4ajsH17

Who funds quantamagazine.org? Why is it always Tao who is cited? This is an ad for the upcoming IPOs because AI fails everywhere. Including in math, where there are no serious results and just the people who already loved tinkering with Lean before AI jump on the bandwagon. Maybe mathematicians have looked jealously at software engineers who can survive by just tinkering with new tools all the time without making real progress and think: We can do this, too!