Is AI really as a good as a pure mathematician? |
That AI was part of solving a pure mathematical problem 80 years after it was posed does not mean it is superintelligent.
I was astonished to see in a 29 May Wall Street Journal article that OpenAI’s AI model had solved a problem posed by the famous mathematician Paul Erdös in 1946. The problem had never been solved before.
According to the Journal, the statement of the problem was the prompt given to the AI model. The prompt is in the form of a theorem of pure mathematics. It is totally inscrutable to all except pure mathematicians. The article then says that the model ‘spat out’ a proof that is in the same incomprehensible language. Both the prompt and the proof are reproduced in the WSJ article.
I have not used it in any serious way since completing my graduate studies many years ago, but I have a PhD in pure mathematics. I recognise the language and the essence of the problem, and the nature of the solution.
But the WSJ article is misleading. It gives the impression that the statement of the problem was fed as a prompt into the AI model, whereupon it ‘spat out’ the inscrutable (except to pure mathematicians) solution.
A little more digging shows this is not quite true. It may be true that the statement of the problem that the WSJ reproduced was what was fed into the model. The model then produced a running commentary on its investigations, its ’thought process’, as it were. This eventually produced a result that the attending mathematicians could clean up and restate in an elegant mathematical statement of........