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Davidzhengyesterday at 7:58 AM1 replyview on HN

Sorry last comment was a bit emotional from me, but I do not think it's findable like you say--during my PhD I tried to find some ideals I knew existed in char 2 in 5 variables and low degree and I didn't think I ever got close. 3 variables, 7 degree, coefficients up to 6 is like 6^100 possibilities. You've got to narrow it down somewhat no? Even sparse is intractable I would guess.

I think the solutions which rely on the least amount of theory are the most telling of the AIs being higher in intelligence than humans today already. There's almost no theory to teach someone to understand the cycle double cover conjecture as you say, yet no one finds it. I don't think the conclusion is that it was "easy", but that it was in fact irreducibly difficult in a way that proofs developed with theory are not. Theory gives the human brain abstractions to simplify complex proofs to be understandable at our capacity--I think there are many proofs which probably are not of this form.

But I think our differences hinge on how hard we perceive these solutions to be--I think they are very hard to find!


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Davidzhengyesterday at 8:29 AM

But actually my feeling is that the final solutions of these last two problems probably is hiding how the AI came up with them! For all we know it used a LOT of theory! As Dolly Parton says "it takes a lot of money to look this cheap" and it takes a lot of intelligence for the proofs to look this dumb. [In high school, I knew of this competition math kid joke where after you derive an inequality with various methods, you use standard results to write the original equations as just a sum-of-squares---like in a "are you stupid, it's >=0 bc it's a sum of squares" sort of way]