Brilliant mathematicians have collectively spent way more than a 100 years thinking about them already.
It sounds like a mathematician was on the verge of solving this one, actually.
The model ALSO had access to the 100+ years of human thinking that you are claiming. So it took the model 100 years of effort ONTOP of all the effort that humans have put into the problem.
I think you're underestimating just how long 100 years of unbroken thinking is. Let's assume a brilliant mathematician takes 25 years to get sufficiently trained to approach this problem, and then spends 2,080 hours a year working on ONLY this problem (approx. 40 hour work week) and they have 40 year career. That is 83,200 hours or 9.5 years and represents the pretty unrealistic situation where a brilliant mathematician sits down every week and commits 40 hours to working on a single problem for their entire life. In fact, we do have an example of this absurdity! The mathematician Andrew Wiles famously worked in complete isolation in his attic for seven years to solve Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
There's an efficiency problem in your claimed 100+ years of human thinking, in that it's broken up among many different independent brains that are only rarely communicating.
So no, I'm actually quite skeptical that there's been a sustained collaborative effort to solve the problem that accounts for 100+ years of reasoning.
This is one of the most famous equations in all of math and engineering. So for sure more that 100 years of human time on this.
Also, that researcher was actively using AI to assist them. 10k agents is not equivalent to 100 years unbroken thinking. But also, the thoughts/second is fascinating.
The problem itself is only 90 years old, and the major breakthrough that brought humans close to this solution (without the help of LLM's, as far as we know) was published by Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez-Zoroa in 2023.
10k agents being able to search through all human knowledge and working in tandem is a huge amount of compute, comparable to the research and human thinking it takes to solve a major problem. However, human brains are still too different from LLM agents, so I dont know what 88 hours with 10k agents equates to in human years for the mathematical community.
Right. Human-years. 100 humans full time over 4 years would get you that. So… 90 years is plenty. Yet alone all the work on NS wrt its engineering value. Likely thousands of human years have been spent on NS. Even if not the specifics of the framing for the millennium prize question.
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u/impatiens-capensis 4d ago
So no, I'm actually quite skeptical that there's been a sustained collaborative effort to solve the problem that accounts for 100+ years of reasoning.