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Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

18 points soltanov 2 hours ago 13 comments

Xcelerate 31 minutes ago | parent

I sort of wonder if effectively using AI to solve math problems is a skill in its own right, distinct from traditional mathematical skills. I don’t just mean “prompt engineering” either. More so figuring out how to combine agents with other tools and approaches in an effective way.

firesteelrain 20 minutes ago | parent

Agree this is a broad statement for any use of AI for any purpose. Open ended prompts / requests are bound to lead to misleading results, hallucinated responses, waste of tokens, etc

breezybottom 12 minutes ago | parent

You still have to be able to verify the solution to say that it's solved, so I'd say no.

perching_aix 8 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure that makes sense? Having the expertise to verify the completion of a given task is a usually necessary but not sufficient requirement to what they're describing.

You seem to be imagining completely independent areas of competence, but I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation of what they wrote.

htrp 21 minutes ago | parent

the fact that you have to encourage these models and tell them that they can solve these problems and warm up on easier problems seems to indicate that there's something to AI pairing above and beyond prompt

bananaflag 15 minutes ago | parent

Yeah it s because they have a strong prior on unsolved problems being unsolvable.

Once the idea of AI routinely solving conjectures enters the training data this encouragement will disappear like 2023-era prompt engineering did.

sp-ti-en-ma-in 19 minutes ago | parent

paper:

Title: BOUNDED RATIOS FOR LORENTZIAN POLYNOMIALS

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.05341

catpower 18 minutes ago | parent

Great short term achievement but humanity is better served by these kids doing it without AI. The ideas have to come from the next generation (eg would we be worried if a 5 year old wrote the great American novel with AI or not?)

measurablefunc 12 minutes ago | parent

AI is not going away so people will have to get used to it just like they will have to get used to it in software engineering. The alternative is being less productive than people who are happy to use AI to write software & do mathematical research.

no-name-here 15 minutes ago | parent

The real title includes:

> Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students with AI

My title recommendation: Fields Medalist Problem Solved With AI

Opus 5 and ChatGPT 5.6 Sol were used for “computation, proof idea generation, and editing assistance”.

Although it's a tiny bit odd how they list the AIs used - “Claude Opus 5, Anthropic and ChatGPT Sol5.6 were used for calculations, proof ideas, and editorial assistance.”

dataflow 15 minutes ago | parent

What I'm curious about is how far they would've gotten without the postdoc.

1299348 13 minutes ago | parent

Not peer reviewed. UCLA seems to be full of AI boosters who perform circus tricks.