alt Hacker NewsThe great thing about these mathematical mopping up type operations is that no person will waste their time trying to prove it to be true anymore. If anything that’s a win.
It would be great if an LLM could settle the Collatz conjecture next, god knows how many man-years have been burned on that by unsuspecting victims.
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I don't think this is how this works. The next step is to determine for what kinds of polynomials the jacobian conjecture is true and for what kinds of polynomials it's false.
I used to be a young mathematician sometime at the turn of the century...
"waste their time trying to prove it" is the MBA approach, where you should spit out results and articles.
Outside the MBA-thinking box, attacking hard problems, even unsuccessfully, is the way to gain deeper insight into various results and tools that you can later apply to other problems, i.e. no waste of time at all, unless you go to the extremes (like spending years on a single problem and nothing else).
The reason this was "easy" is because the conjecture turned out to be false. If the collatz conjecture holds true (and most mathematicians seem to think it will), it will be much harder to prove than your average Erdos problem.