Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

ssoltanov about 3 hours ago 26 commentsRead Article on htx.com

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no-name-here•42 minutes ago

Real title includes:

> Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students with AI

My title recommendation: Fields Medalist Problem Solved With AI

They used AI for “computation, proof idea generation, and editing assistance”.

It’s a bit odd how they list the AIs used - “Claude Opus 5, Anthropic and ChatGPT Sol5.6 were used for calculations, proof ideas, and editorial assistance.”

htrp•about 1 hour ago

the fact that you have to encourage these models and tell them that they can solve these problems and warm up on easier problems seems to indicate that there's something to AI pairing above and beyond prompt

asolove•21 minutes ago

They are relying on training data of humans talking about how hard these problems are. Same way an un-reminded Claude gives estimates for work that are as if a human is doing it by hand, but then will drop them by 20x if you remind them it’s going to do the work.

bananaflag•41 minutes ago

Yeah it s because they have a strong prior on unsolved problems being unsolvable.

Once the idea of AI routinely solving conjectures enters the training data this encouragement will disappear like 2023-era prompt engineering did.

arscan•20 minutes ago

I would think this type of behavior (ugh, or dare I say default mindset) by consumer-facing LLMs will always be desirable for ‘hard’ problems (things previously unsolved) because it’s a bit like having saftey mechanisms in place to prevent hallucinations for users incapable of verifying correctness of the output. You’ve got to do a little work to prove you understand that it’s hard but it’s still something the LLM might be able to accomplish.

sp-ti-en-ma-in•about 1 hour ago

paper:

Title: BOUNDED RATIOS FOR LORENTZIAN POLYNOMIALS

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.05341

emil-lp•22 minutes ago

If you replace "pdf" with "abs" the link sends you to the arXiv landing site.

gbacon•12 minutes ago

Like so: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05341

robotpepi•3 minutes ago

i wonder if anyone is going to read that.

Aargau•18 minutes ago

Working backwards from the Navier-Stokes solution, I was able to walk Astra through the path used to solve it. It took some formulation, starting with the problem, then challenging it to look closer at the specific path, and iterating when it got stuck, it was able to reach the solution.

dataflow•41 minutes ago

What I'm curious about is how far they would've gotten without the postdoc.

srean•29 minutes ago

This is a common pattern ahead of admissions season. Now admissions are mostly done I suppose.

Xcelerate•about 1 hour ago

I sort of wonder if effectively using AI to solve math problems is a skill in its own right, distinct from traditional mathematical skills. I don’t just mean “prompt engineering” either. More so figuring out how to combine agents with other tools and approaches in an effective way.

stabbles•15 minutes ago

If it is a skill, it's something that can be learned by both humans and LLMs.

firesteelrain•about 1 hour ago

Agree this is a broad statement for any use of AI for any purpose. Open ended prompts / requests are bound to lead to misleading results, hallucinated responses, waste of tokens, etc

breezybottom•38 minutes ago

You still have to be able to verify the solution to say that it's solved, so I'd say no.

perching_aix•35 minutes ago

I'm not sure that makes sense? Having the expertise to verify the completion of a given task is a usually necessary but not sufficient requirement to what they're describing.

You seem to be imagining completely independent areas of competence, but I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation of what they wrote.

Founderarcstone•12 minutes ago

Great to see high school students getting attention on this.

1299348•40 minutes ago

Not peer reviewed. UCLA seems to be full of AI boosters who perform circus tricks.

catpower•44 minutes ago

Great short term achievement but humanity is better served by these kids doing it without AI. The ideas have to come from the next generation (eg would we be worried if a 5 year old wrote the great American novel with AI or not?)

measurablefunc•39 minutes ago

AI is not going away so people will have to get used to it just like they will have to get used to it in software engineering. The alternative is being less productive than people who are happy to use AI to write software & do mathematical research.

vouaobrasil•3 minutes ago

But isn't it a horrible thing that what you just described (being forced by the prisoner's dilemma), is what defines progress these days?

oasisaimlessly•22 minutes ago

It is still an unknown whether an unqualified increase in productivity in the long-term for software engineering is a given.

qarl•18 minutes ago

Really? OK - then let me stand up and vouch that I am at least 20X more productive with AI.