alt Hacker News> Jarred prompted Claude to try again, and it spent a day and a half coordinating about 60 Claude subagents, which this time went much deeper: between them, they ran 2,400 shell commands and wrote hundreds of Python scripts.1
If there is anything to learn from the history of science, it is that breakthroughs happen via better or new theory and not by brute-force compute [1].
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Nah, the main lesson is that fundamentally new ways of doing things are only accepted once the old guard are all dead [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
> If there is anything to learn from the history of science, it is that breakthroughs happen via better or new theory and not by brute-force compute
that might just be an illusion. humanity as a whole applies brute force by just trying all the reasonable new theories until one of us discovers something that works and declares it a breakthrough
This isn't 'brute-force'. It's just time-compressed. You could imagine a human(s) getting this result similarly, but it would take months/years.
Brute-force compute hasn't been an option for most of the history of science.
Sometimes you just need to put in some effort to looking through the search space, not even exhaustively. This seems to be able to do automate doing that work.
I think that mathematics is a uniquely positioned space because this type of progress is possible for AI models exactly because they do not have to necessarily come up with new theories.