alt Hacker NewsIt just occurred to me that this "it's not the destination, it's the journey", what you learn and contribute by trying to solve a problem, may point to what I'm guessing is an unpopular conclusion...
It may actually be a negative, rather than a positive, for AI to have solved these problems.
If humans had continued to work on these problems, then its quite possible they may have invented new math along the way and benefited the field. Now that the problems are solved, in one manner, I would assume that the level of human interest in them is much diminished, and the likelihood of these problems generating the same benefit for mathematics has diminished. Erdos chose his problems precisely because he thought they could advance the field.
AI itself does not appear to have benefited from solving these problems - they are hard for a human but apparently fairly easy for an AI. We don't just have one result here, proven after great labor, but 10 (with more results rumored to be withheld), with the effort/cost to generate them reported to be low.
The temptation to announce AI solutions to problems that are hard for humans, easy for AI, may be hard to resist, but perhaps there would be more benefit to be had to leave the hard for human problems for humans to solve, and be more impressed when AI solves problems that are hard for AI.
As Hans Moravec noted "What's easy for humans is hard for computers, and what's hard for humans is easy for computers", and while AI is trying to make inroads into that, it still remains fundamentally true.
I'm not a mathematician, so I may be talking nonsense. Would it not be equally possible that AI solutions to these problems have, or start revealing new maths, or new techniques. I doubt that is the case for these type of problems, but it may well be in the future. And maybe these techniques are seen by the right people, who have the correct intuition of how they may be a bridge in other problems.
Or another angle. Given that, from my amateur understanding, a lot of these problems are proof by counter-example, could you not argue that at least AI eliminates low hanging fruit and more important problems can gain focus.
Of course, I could equally argue that the low hanging fruit is needed to train up mathematicians.
So yeah, in the end, I don't know. But am pretty certain that AI is not going to be limited by these sort of proofs for much longer.