alt Hacker NewsHe sees value in mathematicians using AI to carefully study mathematics, develop an understanding of both old and new things, and help others understand the new things.
He doesn't see value in scrolling through unsolved problems asking an AI to please solve them. In his view, this is a fundamental confusion about what mathematical research is for. Knocking down unsolved problems without developing the community's understanding of them is like prompting Claude to go through a Jira board, write code for all the open tickets, and then close them without merging or deploying the code.
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bluecheese452 • yesterday at 10:20 PM
Isn’t it more like it merges the code without a dev reviewing or understanding it?
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> He doesn't see value in scrolling through unsolved problems asking an AI to please solve them.
Yet that's exactly how the field works. A new grad student is tasked with finding a suitably difficult problem from a list of unsolved problems. The sweet spot is obscure, so that fewer people are working on it, but not too obscure that no one knows about it. It works the same way in theoretical physics and theoretical Comp Sci, and I speak from insider knowledge. The rosy view of mathematicians in the media is largely a product of marketing.