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blovescoffeeyesterday at 9:57 PM1 replyview on HN

Why would you bet against it being solved by LLMs? Isn't this very post proof that LLMs in an agentic harness are capable of doing real math? If you just keep cranking away at the tokens I don't see a principled argument against that leading to more solutions to unsolved math, even the hardest problems.


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CSMastermindyesterday at 10:47 PM

There are different classes of mathematical problems.

The one in the post definitely shows the advantages that LLMs have compared to humans for some problems but it's in an entirely different class than the Riemann Hypothesis.

Riemann is one of the most studied math problems of all times and all of humanity has basically collectively failed to make progress. The idea that there's some technique that just hasn't been tried yet (like in the post) is very very unlikely.

The general consensus is that we'll need an entirely new branch of mathematics to solve Riemann - our current tools aren't just inadequate; they're of the wrong class entirely.

I suspect inventing new branches of math will remain beyond LLMs for the remainder of my life.

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