@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz
Post #3654262
2026-07-06 09:06 UTC
@androcat@toot.cat - math is different from most subjects in that it doesn't need to be "about" anything: it can be a game of following rules. Treating it as a game is superficial, because that attitude can't tell the difference between important good math and silly bad math. But if you know what theorems you want to prove, something that's good at playing the game can help you.
Nonmathematicians often don't realize that the hard part is figuring out what theorems are worth proving.
Replies (1)
-
@androcat@toot.cat 2026-07-06 09:12
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz I definitely see it as a game. Or a set of games, really, because one of the fun parts is changing the rules and seeing what that new game will be like. ... but I don't see how an LLM can do any of that. It's not a brain, it doesn't understand what it intakes, and it can't even follow rules : it only apes randomized parts of the (stolen) corpus it's working from. So either, examples of success are 1) cherry-picked from an ocean of failures OR 2) actually failures that have been manually reworked in entirety ...unless something makes math very different from every other field we've seen trampled by the GenBS so far.