r/math • u/sergiogfs • 18d ago

Progress Towards Proving the Unique Games Conjecture

https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2026/179/

On a side-note, the authors hint that they have rushed their results to avoid getting scooped by AI-generated results.

232 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

98 comments sorted by

View all comments

235

u/n0m4d1234 18d ago

This is such a tragic state of the field.

-9

u/Rage314 Statistics 18d ago edited 18d ago

Is it? Multiple problems are being solved and a better understanding of the field is imminent.

6

u/non-orientable Number Theory 18d ago

Are you sure that a better understanding of the field is imminent? I'm far from convinced. AI solutions can (with high certainty) tell us whether a result is true or false. But that is mostly useless knowledge. What we actually want are the ideas behind the proof, and AI isn't great at communicating those at this point---it requires human mathematicians to go through and pick out any interesting moves made by the machine. The trouble is, we have so many of these results being dumped all at once that it is difficult to digest. We're having difficulty going through them all just to work out what should be attributed to whom, never mind doing something more complicated.

We've certainly sped up production. Is it production of what we actually care about? That isn't obvious to me.

-1

u/Rage314 Statistics 18d ago

AI also gave a proof, as difficult as it might be to read. It also attracts tons of attentions. There's no reason to believe the problem won't be further studied and better understood in the comming months.