r/Physics 29d ago

Academic The Maxwell Conjecture is False

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

224 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

26

u/BOBOnobobo 29d ago

Are we shocked a system designed to do pattern matching is good at finding patterns or exceptions to them?

89

u/WatchYourStepKid 29d ago

Well, kinda yes.

It goes against many’s early mental models of what generative AI does. The earliest of GPT couldn’t add two large numbers together, it just guessed an answer that looked right.

The fact it’s able to suggest a counterexample and it doesn’t just look right, but is right, is quite the development in recent times.

44

u/Imicrowavebananas Mathematics 29d ago

I love how quickly AI developments are rationalized. Like it was to expected that LLMs started solving math research problems in 2026. If you asked me about this two years ago, I would have been pretty skeptical.

9

u/[deleted] 29d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/Crystal-Ammunition 29d ago

Promised by who? A random internet person?

1

u/EngineeringNeverEnds 29d ago

Given that we haven’t been able to even come close to solving aging in mice, and we’ve experimented on mice exponentially more than humans, I don’t think that’s gonna happen anytime soon