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Comment by nadermx | Hacker News Reader

This just shows that with the right training, in this case a thesis on erdos problems, they where able to prompt and check the output. So still needed the know how to even being to figure it out. "Lichtman proved Erdős right as part of his doctoral thesis in 2022."

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Lichtman is an expert who commented for the story. Liam Price is the one who prompted ChatGPT. "He’s 23 years old and has no advanced mathematics training."

“I didn’t know what the problem was—I was just doing Erdős problems as I do sometimes, giving them to the AI and seeing what it can come up with,” he says. “And it came up with what looked like a right solution.”

"He sent it to his occasional collaborator Kevin Barreto, a second-year undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge."

So basically two undergrads/graduates in math, "advanced" is subjective at that point.

I don't see where it says Price was an undergraduate/graduate in math.

I don't see where it doesn't say he is, I feel its implied. Another source, proves me right? https://www.newscientist.com/article/2511954-amateur-mathema...

https://archive.is/oQvO4

It's implied by "no advanced mathematics training?"

The article you linked (thanks for the unpaywalled link, by the way) describes him only as an amateur mathematician, but describes Barreto as a math student. If they were both math students, I feel it would say so?

Or perhaps you're arguing it's implicit in him having solved the problem? If so, you're just assuming your conclusion. "AI didn't prove it by itself; Price was a mathematician. Well, he must have been a mathematician to be able to prove it!"

I'm saying that it wasn't a random person who had no training in math, still miraculous achievement; just trying to show they still had to study maths to even understand how to present the problem and verify it.

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