Post

mr. TIM
@timkellogg.me

the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture, a graph theory problem that’s gone unsolved for 30 years, was solved with this prompt

Boxo McFoxo
@boxobark.ing

"unsolved for 30 years" makes it sound like hundreds of mathematicians were grinding on this problem constantly for the past three decades like all the others that "AI" has "solved" so far, this one was pretty much sitting on a shelf

2 reposts41 likes

Boxo McFoxo
@boxobark.ing

What, you mean we shouldn't just take the co-founder of an AI startup's word for it? Yes, we need human peer reviewers to confirm that the Lean that was output by the model actually matches the problem.

Boxo McFoxo
@boxobark.ing

But if it is correct, it's an achievement of automation and scale. I hate this "unsolved for x years" framing because it implies that someone has been constantly working on it for those years, and no human mathematician could possibly have accomplished this, they were all stumped.

enragedfilia.bsky.social
@enragedfilia.bsky.social

What I was imagining at first (having read nothing whatsoever about the problem) was more along the lines of Fermat's last theorem or the twin prime conjecture - easy or even trivial to prove over an arbitrarily large set of inputs but impossible to generalize to infinity without a novel approach.

Boxo McFoxo
@boxobark.ing

Also, on X The Everything App with a bunch of crypto bros retweeting it for clout should really not be the way that new mathematical proofs are announced.