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QuesnayJryesterday at 10:59 AM1 replyview on HN

The retrospective view is important, though. In retrospect, these problems weren't that hard. (The unit distance graph problem was the hardest.) There are some problems that still seem hard, even when we know the answer. Nobody thinks that Fermat's last theorem is easy, even though now know it to be true.

Before AI, it was pretty rare that a problem that turned to be unexpectedly easy, so mathematicians thought they were pretty good judges of it. (The last pre-AI example I can remember is the Gaussian correlation conjecture.) So thanks to AI we have learned that we were overconfident in our ability to judge difficulty.

If a truly major problem falls, like the Riemann hypothesis, and the proof turns out to be 10 pages, then the lesson will be a different one -- mathematicians are bad at math, and they should turn to more natural domains for them, like folding and putting away towels.


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betafjyesterday at 12:15 PM

If some LLM is able to come up with a simple proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (a solution that Fermat himself could come up with) in the future, would you still say that Fermat's Last Theorem is hard?

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