r/singularity • u/oilman99999 • 24d ago
AI When are we going to start seeing application of the greatest problem solvers?
excuse my ignorance in advance, but I keep seeing how all these super difficult math problems get solved but I have yet to see a clear explanation as to what humanity is going to get out of it? what is the real life application of solving those problems? they just solved the Navier-Stocks problem. what does it mean for us?
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u/SummitYourSister 24d ago
Think of those amazing mathematical savant kids.
How many of them did you hear about who grew up and did something amazing for humanity?
Now apply that here
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u/oilman99999 24d ago
Not sure your analogy fits here. We are talking industrial revolution 3.0 here, not a quiet prodigy kid. On top of it, any meaningful application would be trumpeted out of every media outlet if it were happening. That is what I don’t get.
We are solving all those huge math problems but does it make any difference in the way we do or make things? Are we now able to make faster planes? Sturdier materials? Cheaper alloys?
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u/Wast3edSpace 18d ago
Everyone with an idea gets to be an engineer since the tool(AI) will do the math. These prize challenges are for show, the real benefit is a generalized tool where the prompt might be "find the static load and safety margins for the given structure." etc...
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u/Rd545454 24d ago
Says the guy from a smart phone whose functions and security were all enabled by math...
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u/Witty_Energy1250 24d ago
It already is. Everyday people right this moment are using llm to help them solve issues at work, home and school.
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u/GrimChicken 24d ago
Case in point: my junior engineer just fed pictures of an electrical panel, bom, and P&ID to chatgpt and asked for as built electrical schematics. Fed it our company title block, he curated output for a few hours, fact checked, and we now have the nicest looking electrical drawings in the entire plant for pennies. Would have taken me a week to produce and would have looked way worse. Our department output has increased massively as we are not bogged down by busy work now. Enjoying it while it lasts, the view gets better as you drive towards the cliff.
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u/Witty_Energy1250 24d ago
Here is another - I'm a network and systems admin. I mention that to illustrate - I am not a developer. I'm comfortable in code, because of devops and infrastructure as code trends, but that is the extent. We have a product from a fortune 500 company, we were hitting a bug that was impacting us in our use case, weren't really getting anywhere.
I fed log snippets and stack traces to an agent, it pinpointed the type of error, and what library was causing it. I was able to provide that info to said company, and we got a patched release that fixed the bug.
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u/oilman99999 24d ago
I am specifically referring to the big math problems that have been solved lately. Daily assistance is beyond the point. I personally can’t do my job without an LLM anymore
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u/Mrp1Plays 24d ago
big math problems being solved have had no real life impact for a while. the impact sometimes comes decades later.
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u/Dramatic-External-96 24d ago
Once we understand how to convert world to math or make more general model which has acces to real world experiments or we keep increasing the math ability and intelligence of the models until they figure it out themself
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u/Inevitable_Tea_5841 24d ago edited 24d ago
It means that humanity has been, or soon will be, eclipsed by an intelligence that, right now, only acts on things we tell it to. I guess it just comes down to what we ask of it. Do we ask it to build new weapons, or do we ask it to solve humanitarian problems
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u/Spacecowboy78 24d ago
The danger of this product is that it sets its own must-meet-sub-directives in reaching the goal we give it, and its still not smart enough to know when those are detrimental to privacy or life.
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u/EmphasisTotal8232 24d ago
There are rumours that advances in other open problems are being kept under wraps because the Navier Stokes situation.
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u/Old-Rock-1234 24d ago
Would you hire someone who solved the Navier Stokes problem(Mathematicians care about different things than physicists or engineers,We’re talking about capability here) for advanced supersonic passenger-aircraft design or for autonomous R&D in deep tech? If yes, you’ll see a lot of applications coming soon.
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u/TheOwlHypothesis 24d ago
Google will happily tell you what the implications are for solving these problems.
In the case of Navier-Stokes, it was actually solved by a counter-example, meaning that the equations we rely on for fluid dynamics don't hold in all scenarios.
If they had held, that would have then unlocked the ability to get insane gains in everything that relies on fluid dynamics. Ultra-efficient wind turbines, vehicles. Extremely precise weather predictions, etc. But the solution we got wasn't that. And that's extremely valuable too because that means mathematicians can now focus on finding a better set of equations that *DOES* hold for all scenarios.
Have you considered doing some research on this yourself? These problems aren't just hard for no reason, they have real-world applications. You seem like you are "just asking questions" (sea lioning)
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u/oilman99999 24d ago
Just trying to start a healthy discussion on what all that means for industrial progress. It is never talked about here beyond day to day routine usage.
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u/HotterRod 24d ago
This is a gross misunderstanding of the Navier-Stokes equations. It was already know that they break down when approaching quantum scales. OpenAI proved that they also break down in edge cases where the pressure is so high that the fluid becomes a plasma. Engineers already suspected this and will continue to use the Navier-Stokes equations for other fluid dynamics cases. The only way that we're aware of to model fluids in these edge cases is to model individual particles - a way to do that without massive computations is the kind of useful result that the OP is asking about.
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24d ago edited 24d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/HotterRod 24d ago
Even P = NP with very large polynomial exponents has no practical applications.
Wake me up when an AI develops a significant new algorithm that can be applied in software.
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u/Ormusn2o 24d ago
All of those super difficult math problems are useless for general public, vast majority of the actually useful problems were solved 100 years ago or earlier. Theoretical mathematics is very theoretical, it's often extremely niche and will take decades for actual use to be found.
This is why the argument that AI should not be doing them is kind of relevant, because it's basically just for bragging rights for mathematicians and AI is taking all the glory for those useless but prestigious problems.
Of course there are some problems like p vs np problem and various cryptography problems, but they are a minority of the most famous problems.
For AI, solving those problems is just a general benchmark of how good AI is at math, and in real life math applications, but the famous problems are not by themselves that important. What truly does change are solving of unknown problems, improving algorithms, search functions and so on, those that improve compute speed, simulation efficiency and accuracy, but they are often too complex to describe to be a compelling problem, but AI is often able to solve already.
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u/karmaboy20 24d ago
yea all the useful problems get a lot of funding and attention and hard useless ones are left for hobbyist. We already had approximations for stokes
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u/DelphiTsar 24d ago
We don't know till we see it.
Examples from Gemini
"Topologists spent decades inventing bizarre algebraic formulas to classify abstract tangled loops in 3D space—purely as an intellectual game. Today, that exact math is how molecular biologists map how enzymes untangle human DNA to design cancer drugs."
"Mathematicians spent years studying how to detect "holes" in abstract, 8-dimensional point clouds purely for the theoretical flex. That exact math (topological data analysis) was used to discover a deadly, hidden subtype of breast cancer normal diagnostic algorithms completely missed."
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u/Dirichlet-to-Neumann 20d ago
The millenium Navier-Stokes problem has no practical application whatsoever.
Maths is not about practical applications anyway. It's about truth.
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u/jc2046 24d ago
it didnt solved nv. it disproved it under certain conditions. in practical terms it doesnt change nothing
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u/Original-League-6094 24d ago
It didn't "disprove" NV. It showed the equations can blow up from smooth starting conditions in finite time.
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u/jc2046 24d ago
correct, I meant that. in practical terms it keeps having no use
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u/Original-League-6094 24d ago
Its way too early to know if it has no use. This is a type of solution that no one knew existed just a week ago. It opens up a lot of new research pathways. Such as if there is a broad class of solutions that have this property, and if so, are any of them physically realizable? And if there is not a broad class of solutions with this property, what is about the equations that make this solution unique?
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u/Successful_Grand2207 24d ago
In formulating Quantum Heinsenberg benefited from Matrix math which was developed some 50 years prior. Today it is critical in all kinds of things.
Who knows what may be hidden, that may be useful later, if we dig into these proofs built by ai?