alt Hacker NewsThat may be, and we can debate the level of novelty, but it is novel, because this exact proof didn't exist before, something which many claim was not possible with AI. In fact, just a few years ago, based on some dabbling in NLP a decade ago, I myself would not have believed any of this was remotely possible within the next 3 - 5 decades at least.
I'm curious though, how many novel Math proofs are not close enough to something in the prior art? My understanding is that all new proofs are compositions and/or extensions of existing proofs, and based on reading pop-sci articles, the big breakthroughs come from combining techniques that are counter-intuitive and/or others did not think of. So roughly how often is the contribution of a proof considered "incremental" vs "significant"?
Well, for one the proof would have to use actual proof techniques.
What really happened here was that the LLM produced a python script that generated examples of hypergraphs that served as proof by example.
And the only thing that has been verified are these examples. The LLM also produced a lot of mathematical text that has not been analyzed.