Comment by heliumtera
15 hours ago
Don't feel bad for being out of the loop. The author and Tao did not care enough about erdos problem to realize the proof was published by erdos himself. So you never cared enough and neither did they. But they care about about screaming LLMs breakthrough on fediverse and twitter.
> Did not care enough about erdos...
This is bad faith. Erdos was an incredibly prolific mathematician, it is unreasonable to expect anyone to have memorized his entire output. Yet, Tao knows enough about Erdos to know which mathematical techniques he regularly used in his proofs.
From the forum thread about Erdos problem 281:
> I think neither the Birkhoff ergodic theorem nor the Hardy-Littlewood maximal inequality, some version of either was the key ingredient to unlock the problem, were in the regular toolkit of Erdos and Graham (I'm sure they were aware of these tools, but would not instinctively reach for them for this sort of problem). On the other hand, the aggregate machinery of covering congruences looks relevant (even though ultimately it turns out not to be), and was very much in the toolbox of these mathematicians, so they could have been misled into thinking this problem was more difficult than it actually was due to a mismatch of tools.
> I would assess this problem as safely within reach of a competent combinatorial ergodic theorist, though with some thought required to figure out exactly how to transfer the problem to an ergodic theory setting. But it seems the people who looked at this problem were primarily expert in probabilistic combinatorics and covering congruences, which turn out to not quite be the right qualifications to attack this problem.
Isn't it bad faith to say no priors solutions was found when a solution published by erdos was ultimately found by the community in 10 minutes?
Maybe, that's a decent point. I didn't realize it was that quick, I would have appreciated you mentioning that in your previous comment.
It does beg the question, if it was so easy to find the prior solution, why has no one posted it already on the erdos problems website?
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This Tao dude, does he get invited to a lot of AI conferences (accommodation included)?
He's the most prolific and famous modern mathematician. I'm pretty sure that even if he'd never touched AI, he would be invited to more conferences than he could ever attend.
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I know someone who organized a conference where he spoke (this was before the AI boom, probably around 2018 or so) and he got very good accommodations and also a very generous speaking fee.