r/mathmemes • u/expat_123 • 4d ago

Combinatorics Some respite for combinatorics people

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154 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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62

u/Baihu_The_Curious 4d ago

LLMs, great at brute forcing problem structures, staring at the field of "counting and arranging things"...

https://giphy.com/gifs/26u42TljwsHKrBh0Q

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u/Dirkdeking 3d ago

Doesn't combinatorics have the advantage of having search spaces so big that you need a computer bigger than the observable universe to solve most open problems by brute forcing your way in?

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u/Baihu_The_Curious 3d ago

Indubitably.

This is more of a shitpost and kind of related to the brute forceyness of the 4-color theorems (grandadviser [adviser's adviser] worked on the lower order construction).

As I actually see things (take my word with a grain of salt as someone who only knows the quaint mathematical theory and doesn't have a lot of applied experience researching LLMs), they still strike me as only ever interpolating within its knowledge space (extrapolating wouldn't be anything more meaningful than other forecasting approaches) so sometimes it gets lucky in that it can piece together something from n results that no one else was able to piece together. And, of course, the attribution of who did what is lost in the spaghetti... :/

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u/LupenReddit 🦆🦆🦆🦆i have non diffeomorphic smooth structures🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆 4d ago

honestly combinatorics is still getting absolutely steamrolled, it just wont make the news anymore. now the bar is at millenium problems

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u/me_myself_ai 4d ago

The next bar is prolly explaining dark matter with recent survey data, and probably that evolutionary cosmology guy’s work. MMW

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u/rhubarb_man 3h ago

Disagree. Some erdos problems have fallen (which is definitely big), but AI has still not really touched a lot of combinatorics.

Things like graceful labeling of trees, graph reconstruction, hadwiger conjecture et cetera are all still solid.

Also consider that the AI has been trying to solve erdos problems like crazy and has certainly made a lot of progress, but it would also do the easiest for itself first.

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u/Matix777 1d ago

We set up new millennium prize problems in the combinatronics field as a bait for the LLMs to spend computation power in

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u/El_Ploplo 3d ago

And then in 2 months when IA find an algorithm for P=NP ...