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oerstedtoday at 5:58 AM1 replyview on HN

There are many conjectures that we know are almost surely true, but we don't know why, and explaining why is the main purpose of the mathematician when publishing a proof.

The fact that we don't know why is a clue pointing at some area of math that we haven't discovered yet. The hope is always that it will uncover some hidden fertile valley that will lead to lots of new discoveries. But the proof of the conjecture itself, without understanding, is really not that valuable.

My point is that even if AI discovers many new truths, there's still plenty to do for the mathematical community, in dissecting it and building useful abstractions to understand it, abstractions that can be leveraged for further exploration and uncovering new questions.


Replies

veunestoday at 7:08 AM

This seems right as long as the AI output is legible enough to reverse-engineer