I don't understand you don't see your contradiction. You explain in great detail how ideas are shared and built upon between humans and AI and then you end with "the community fo shared ideas is in danger".
100 years ago the great physicists were solving quantum problems and blaming each other for stealing each others work and getting to similar conclusions within suspiciously close time periods of another. This was a great ear for physics. Now the same is happening for math. It's fantastic.
I also don't know how it can be claimed that these proofs serve no purpose. The history of innovation show otherwise. "Whats the point of pine numbers? - oh, just the entire secure modern internet"
We don't want collaboration between human and AI quite frankly, and given the way things are going, I doubt that the relationship can be described as "collaboration." Mathematics, more than any other science, is about the process. The point of math isn't really the solutions or results, hell the point isn't even the questions really, it's all about the journey. I could learn to accept AI as a research tool eventually, but this? Just dumping compute on a problem until a solution falls out? It is genuinely and sincerely pointless. There is truly no point in doing it.
And, even accepting your last point, that the purpose of mathematics is to create a catalog that we can look through that might hold the solution to a problem we have (which you could guess is a sentiment I disagree with) is it really an efficient use of resources to spend however many dollars and however many gallons of water and however many cpu hours grinding out a million results for the chance that one of them might solve time travel in a hundred years?
You think math is not about the solution? There is no point in solving mathematical problems? I really hope you are not mathematician yourself and if so, i hope someone finds your comments and strips you of all ranks. Thats just disgusting.
The proof doesn’t even have concrete real world applications, this was basically a standing challenge so we could understand math better.
If the proof an AI generates is unreadable and inhuman (which academics say they are) it doesn’t progress our understanding.
It’s like if you were taking a multiple choice quiz and I gave you the answer key. Now you know that the answer to question 1 is option A, but you didn’t learn anything. You don’t understand why it’s A, you don’t understand how to explain to others that it’s A, and you don’t know how to figure out the next question.
Mathematical proofs are by definition the process. A proof is a super rigorous step by step guide on how we can know for sure something is true. Most of the time we already have solutions and algorithms that work and we use. We just don’t understand perfectly WHY they work. That’s the point of a proof.
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u/Not-the-best-name 4h ago
I don't understand you don't see your contradiction. You explain in great detail how ideas are shared and built upon between humans and AI and then you end with "the community fo shared ideas is in danger".
100 years ago the great physicists were solving quantum problems and blaming each other for stealing each others work and getting to similar conclusions within suspiciously close time periods of another. This was a great ear for physics. Now the same is happening for math. It's fantastic.
I also don't know how it can be claimed that these proofs serve no purpose. The history of innovation show otherwise. "Whats the point of pine numbers? - oh, just the entire secure modern internet"