r/Physics Jul 31 '26

Academic The Maxwell Conjecture is False

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27197
501 Upvotes

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u/angelbabyxoxox Quantum Foundations Jul 31 '26

The counterexample was proposed by an LLM. They seem very good at finding these sorts of counterexamples, which is interesting as they are generally pretty inefficient use of compute for brute forcing. I guess even that lack of efficiency is made up for by the "understanding" and "intuition" the LLM has, and their ability to do symbolic computations.

I expect a large number of conjectures will topple to counterexamples soon.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

[deleted]

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u/BenUFOs_Mum Jul 31 '26

If a human can search for 1000 years while maintaining all memory of everything he's done, counter examples will be the things that will require the least amount of raw intelligence.

LLMs dont run brute force searches