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Comment by jboggan | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. It's just funny, I literally spent thousands of hours with this problem over the last two decades, it helped me through some tough times. I'll never quite be able to think about it in the same way again. It was never much more than a hobby for me after I left mathematics as a career but it was something I took seriously for years.

I am not demotivated though, I have a great consumer privacy product coming out soon that I'm very excited about.

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My favorite thing about your story is that you wrestled (enjoyably, it sounds) with a known problem for decades, but are finding fulfillment in an open ended problem that is exercising creativity about both problem and solution.

IMO that’s where AI is going: as soon as a problem can be formulated clearly enough, AI will trounce us humans. I have yet to see evidence that it can decide what problems are important at a remotely human level.

I think the next test will be asking an AI to come up with a new branch of mathematics - just letting it rip and telling it to construct a system that doesn't reduce to combinatorics, group theory, graph theory, analysis, etc. Just get wild with it and don't start with any known problem as a jumping off point.

I think something like the Collatz conjecture will be solvable not as number theory or ergodic theory but some other completely wacky environment that humans haven't even sniffed at.

If you wrote down any of your thoughts on the open Internet you are probably in some small - or possibly large, unattributed way, responsible for this result being possible.

Which is one reason I never really did. I probably should have but I always thought my attempts were too amateurish. Though I did manage to replicate some partial result papers that I didn't know about, lol. Writing openly would have saved me some years.

Did you feed OpenAI models with your insights though ?

The process is often as valuable as the end result. Sure, you didn't crack the problem, but you gained enormous value in the process. I consider that a win.

Where can I learn more about your upcoming product?

Shoot me an email, in my bio.

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