Erdosproblems.com Succumbs to the AI Onslaught
erdosproblems.com
erdosproblems.com
From the link:
"The main way that people publicly interact with the site now is to advertise their AI-generated proofs, often without any attempt to explain them, but as a way to record a (increasingly meaningless) priority claim.
This is very different to what I imagined, and I don't want to manage a website which does this."
They are thinking about what it is they do and what their intent was in doing it. Their adaptation is not a blind resistance to change but to preserve their intent.
I especially that they explicitly state that this is what they are trying and that not dropping a decree of new rules that are set in stone.
More platforms should take this approach.
But I thought the whole idea of the list was that it catalogued precisely the problems Erdos posed that he did not solve. The broader set of "all problems Erdos found interesting, including those he resolved" would be both larger and I suspect qualitatively different.
To be fair, it isn't just "one of the nerds", it is the nerd that was hosting the party that all the AI bros were gatecrashing. He's not saying the competitive AI-powered and reputation-seeking performative math problem solving shouldn't happen, he's just saying you don't get to do it in the little corner of the internet that he runs any more, showing off to all his friends. Go find some other website where the owner enjoys that, or build your own and create your own community and friends.
What I think you might be missing, though, is that Erdos was inherently playful with these problems. He'd sometimes just drop in the middle of a paper "hey, this variant of this lemma is neat, I bet it's true, but I'll give cash to anyone who disproves it" and move on. Or challenge a colleague while visiting and collaborating with them, and the problem would get spread by word of mouth. The problems often weren't things he thought long and hard about individually, but they appealed to his sense of aesthetics and curiosity and play. I think that's maybe close to what Bloom is talking about there. It's handy to have a catalog, but fundamentally, creating a set of unsolved math problems was not what Erdos was doing.
> He would also muse about the perfect death. It would occur just after a lecture, when he had just finished presenting a proof and a cantankerous member of the audience would have raised a hand to ask, "What about the general case?" In response, Erdos used to say, he would reply, "I think I'll leave that to the next generation," and fall over dead.
I wonder if that's a natural progression when AI users and tools first start to get involved in something, or if it's more that the curl codebase and maintainers/contributors are special and unusually high quality, so there's little left to find by people with little understanding prompting tools trhey are incapable of judging the results generated?
I agree in concept and love the optimism, but this sounds awfully like a thinly veiled “no true Scotsman” argument and, honestly, that’s just ridiculous. Elegance has little to do with how something came to be, it’s a subjective attribute we personally instil onto things under our own set of predefined concepts; hardly a description of an “era”.
Just as one does not open a restaurant in an abattoir, it is important that there be a separation between such repositories and a site which aims to promote the actual questions, place them in an appropriate context, and give a useful overview of the current state of human understanding."
I think this is a very reasonable blog post overall. A site for agents to read has many different needs and concerns than one for humans. Really anthropic or openai should be whipping this up for theirs.
Counter productive and dumb, although not dumb from the viewpoint of an AI company trying to win hearts and minds hoping that translates into revenue.
Lots of mathematical problems require WORK, and now we have a homunculus to do the work. Indeed most AI companies are oriented toward brute forcing every way forward in order to claim the prize of being profitable.
This could genuinely serve the purpose of mathematical understanding for humanity, but in the short run it is a series of stunts. In the long run I am optimistic that we will benefit.
I had been expecting this since updates became irregular.
Perhaps this will force those solving these problems to produce something worthy of arxiv submission. Or maybe someone will produce a knock off site that continues to track these problems.
Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
the saddest are these:
a tragedy of the commons has happened, again.I do not particularly care to debate a theory of why it is so, nor press a charge of malice or intent; mere observation suffices to convince me that this shit is corrosive to the better nature of humanity.
Do you think they also are mostly deficient of scruples?
I especially like that he’s allowing AI if it generates a better learning proof. That’s so considerate.
>Some view the future of mathematics as a dystopian...
>I believe Erdős would have found this future grim indeed
If you describe something as dystopian that is going to majorly bias someone's opinion towards being grim. That doesn't mean that dystopian description is reality.
> Some view the future of mathematics as a dystopian arcade of button-pressing, staring at a screen waiting for AI to do the thinking for us, with the main human involvement limited to asking the initial question and offering sporadic words of encouragement. Each new proof is then thrown into a repository, to only ever be read by other AIs, and the human presses the next button.
Is that your view of all AI native mathematicians? It's not mine, but it seems apparent to me that many people think that this is our future, or even should be our future. Same with building software (which is my field, unlike math).
I would find that personally, to use his word, grim.
>Some view the future of mathematics as a dystopian where the terminator hunts down any person who tries to publish a new math proof so he can maintain a monopoly on proofs
People would find that as grim. Even if the chance of that future being realized was 0%.
What a world we live in...
>Find a question that is meaningful to you, find other humans who are interested in it, and talk about it. Be confused, be stuck, be inspired. Find a messy proof, then find a better one. Get tired, get hungry, get into a flow state. Argue, laugh, give up, drink some coffee, and attack it again.
I’m baffled every time I see people who just don’t get that.