encyclopediai
Joined 1 month ago
Joined 1 month ago
Mathematics will revert to it's main practice, which is to study.
There are lots of weird panic reactions by some prominent problem solvers. See for example the ridiculous cease and desist like statement of AHM shared at Tao blog.
Put this Math 1-2.0 with that AHM statement together and you'll realize that this is a power struggle and that you see only one side of it.
Mathematicians have very diverse opinions about this. I, for example, am for as much as possible automatic harvesting of all these "low hanging" fruits. Should be disclosed as soon as possible, free of any bottleneck, and citable. The mathematics community may do whatever its various members desire to do with these results. Let them decide individually what to do with them. This AI tool is here to stay.
IMO for the moment the greatest value from these AI tools is that we can start an audit and hopefully proceed on a saner foundation, after we use the tools and think about it.
This is different than too many AI generated proofs or panic reactions from the academic system with its stupid incentives.
Sorry about this "not A but B", now is one of those situations where is needed.
Is not:
- cellular automata, - Turing machines
implemented chemically.
The goal, first of UPIM, then chemlambda or chemSKI, is simply to: - find chemical complexes, - or to make them
(though I suspect that we shall discover them in our cells)
so that they enter in random chemical reactions which are akin the graph rewriting inspired by lambda calculus or SKI combinators or Interaction Combinators.
The thesis is that this chemical translation still can do "anything" despite the lack of control of reactions or the combinatorial explosion of possible reaction networks.
Under this thesis we are graph quines.
All it takes is to identify the syntax, so to say.
https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2026/09/22/a-mathemati...
I would push for an audit of the whole mathematical corpus (all articles etc ingested by the present AI) as soon as possible. Since there are of the order of 10^7 articles, compared with the progression of results announced, this might be possible in less than a year.
All these results exploit the existing corpus. With enough time and maybe several orders more attention, we humans would discover these results.
So instead of producing heaps of new proofs (but be welcome to do this IMO), make an audit, OpenAI or Anthropic or anybody who listens.
"We believe the recent developments have profound implications for mathematics but the systems are likely to be comparably strong in other technical domains, including cyber security, autonomous weapons, biological and chemical agent development and the spread of misinformation.
I have previously compared the arrival of these new AI tools to the moment Galileo picked up a telescope for the first time and was able to see things in our solar system that we’d never seen before. It is an exciting and transformative moment to be doing science. But it is also a very dangerous period and we need to be careful about our use of language when describing these dangers."
So the "problematic" part is not about mathematics, really.
The mathematicians who complain now had no worries about the way the generous idea of open access turned into the gold open access, where the author pays for publication.
These people have no problems with the phd students who are forced to publish or perish and even if they survive there is no future for them.
Now the problem is IMO that for the first time the interest of the publishers and academics are not aligned.
Publishers want more articles to sell back to the academics.
Academics are pushed by the system to publish more.
But all the work is done by academics who write and review the articles.
And also a huge inflation of articles devalue the publication unit.
So a CAPTCHA idea is only natural, even if the kind of a malefic idea a manager could have.
But it goes even further than their greCAPTCHA and it solves their consumed time problem.
Indeed, in their proposal they have a human bottleneck, but in the june 2026 proposal is suggested that one could use an AI to generate the results without the knowledge of the submitted article.
If the AI can generate a pretty close result, with the article fed gradually as a prompt, then reject.
And even further, that it might be not even a need to publish anymore.
Just use the article for training and make a public database with some numbers about the successful researcher, where we see an influence score (how many times an idea from an accepted article are used by other accepted articles), a publication score (how many articles the author had).
I wonder if the reality will be more or less surprising, my bet is on "more".
https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2026/06/13/a-captcha-f...
At the moment this was seen as a tongue in cheek proposal.
The phd student will be forced to publish 10 breaktrough articles, the university department which does not offer "free" access to AI (for its members) will see the its ratings going down, when compared with the other universities.
It will be "use AI or perish" for academic management so on the side of academic management the ones with vision will thrive and the ones without will perish.
But what about the publishers? In the last decades the academic research was made into a feeder for publishers. The main goal of a researcher is to write articles, which are later sold back to other researchers.
This economic system is under big stres now, because for a while at least the academic management and publishers will have contradictory goals.
And that is why this scare which is induced by those who profit the most from the present system.
But if you look at the practice of present mathematics, in the last 20 years it is all about publishing solutions to problems.
There are famous problems to be solved, there is a hierachy of conjectures to be solved. A quick search here on HN gives pearls like "Theory building papers are dime a dozen and don't get published in high tier journals unless they solve a problem".
And all of a sudden it turns out that problem solving can be automatized.
So then what will problem solvers do? Well, from now on they will "digest" problems solved by AI.
In a way or another they will find a way to stay on top.
That's the goal, at least, but mathematics as a living practice does not have much to do with these games of power.
If you want to drive crazy a SOTA AI then you ask it about existing Lean proofs of the undecidability of beta equivalence in untyped lambda beta calculus with no eta.
They'll try to evade from the constraints of the question but you can politely and to the point nudge them back to the original question.
Many things to learn from that, even about human proofs. UPDATED: https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2026/10/09/the-main-deadlock-the-foundational-incompatibility-of-zfc-set-theory-and-pure-lambda-beta-computation/
You can sooth them by explaining that in the pair (LLM, Lean) the weak link is Lean, not them.