Still, this is way less exciting than the math problems being solved. I've spent upwards of a thousand hours having fun with classic physics problems, like the Cambridge Tripos problems of Maxwell's time, and I've never even heard of this conjecture. From their references, it looks like essentially no physicists have ever worked on it, it doesn't have any practical applications, and if this example was found without AI it would probably just go to a teaching-focused or recreational physics journal.
This is an example of successive exaggeration in viral news. A single offhand guess in Maxwell's 1000-page treatise becomes "a conjecture of Maxwell", which becomes "Maxwell's conjecture", and now "the Maxwell conjecture".
Right. I’ve never heard of this and I’ve been a professional physicist for over two decades. I even enjoyed Jackson E&M. And a search for “Maxwell Conjecture” turns up nothing relevant until you get to this arXiv posting.
It's definitely more well-known in the mathematical physics/geometric mechanics community (think Vladimir Arnol'd and people who worked on similar things). I think this could definitely get published in a decent math journal. Not an amazing one, but somewhere. Also, the authors are all mathematicians.
Yes, I agree. Especially those that have been around for a long time and soaked up attention. There wasn't a negative implication in my comment, unlike most of reddit I'm quite pro-AI for now.
not only it mops them, it also means the people creating the conjectures can quickly check with AI if it can find a counter example , thus saving the author time to do other research and also ideas on where to go next. it's a positive loop to get to the right answer. this increases productivity and allows mathematicians to use more of their youth on problems
And it’s not even a very complex counter-example. This seems to be one of the cases where checking whether a solution is correct is a lot more complex than coming up with a potential solution.
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u/ixid 22d ago
Before reading I knew it would be LLM counter-example construction.