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Comment by u1hcw9nx | Hacker News Reader

For any practical application, numerical solvers for Navier-Stokes already exist and do a good job.

This proof is just checking the boxes for mathematicians.

The efficacy of applied NS was never in doubt. "Checking the box" is downplaying the magnitude of the discovery quite a bit as it has been unsolved for almost 100 years. Yes, this particular problem with NS no real-world applications, but that's true for 99.9% of math research.

There is no NS proof here. Its just a counter example. There is another team working on a proof but they aren't associated with OpenAI.

Agreed, but i think this underscores my point. We have numerical simulations in materials science too, but that doesn’t mean formally verified theorems about the underlying equations automatically translate to formal (or even informal) verification of simulation results. That’s not to say you can’t make progress with agents, but I think it’s less well defined how you write the goal and progress assessment for an agent

you're as sure of what you say as wrong about it.

Note that your reply has exactly 0 value for anyone who doesn’t already know where and how the parent poster is wrong.

fair enough

which part is wrong?

> For any practical application, numerical solvers for Navier-Stokes already exist and do a good job.

> This proof is just checking the boxes for mathematicians.

If that were true you could explain it. There are lots of solvers for navier stokes simulations and they do a good job.

I was referring mostly to

> This proof is just checking the boxes for mathematicians

There are already quite a lot of summaries of the story that lead to the solution, and the impact that the intermediate results have had.

True, this is just a much bigger one with a vastly larger amounts of hardware.

The same could be said of your post.

OpenAI (claim to) show the existence of *a* finite time singularity. It could stimulate more research in PDE solving, and maybe physics, but it has zero impact on practical applications, that I can see. The Millenium problems were chosen based on hardness not practical relevance.

I was referring to the "it's just mathematicians checking boxes" claim

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