{"id":46669234,"user":"CamperBob2","time":1768754288,"time_ago":"a month ago","type":"comment","content":"

Right, but someone else did ("colleagues.")","comments":[{"id":46670650,"user":"habinero","time":1768761005,"time_ago":"a month ago","type":"comment","content":"

No, they searched for it. There's a lot of math literature out there, not even an expert is going to know all of it.","comments":[{"id":46670810,"user":"CamperBob2","time":1768761818,"time_ago":"a month ago","type":"comment","content":"

Point being, it's not the same proof.","comments":[{"id":46671794,"user":"mmooss","time":1768767929,"time_ago":"a month ago","type":"comment","content":"

Your point seemed to be, if Tao et al. haven't heard of it then it must not exist. The now known literature proof contradicts that claim.","comments":[{"id":46673156,"time":1768777850,"time_ago":"a month ago","type":"comment","content":"[deleted]","deleted":true,"comments":[],"comments_count":0,"level":3,"url":"item?id=46673156"},{"id":46672879,"user":"nl","time":1768775853,"time_ago":"a month ago","type":"comment","content":"

There's an update from Tao after emailing Tenenbaum (the paper author) about this:

> He speculated that "the formulation [of the problem] has been altered in some way"....

[snip]

> More broadly, I think what has happened is that Rogers' nice result (which, incidentally, can also be proven using the method of compressions) simply has not had the dissemination it deserves. (I for one was unaware of it until KoishiChan unearthed it.) The result appears only in the Halberstam-Roth book, without any separate published reference, and is only cited a handful of times in the literature. (Amusingly, the main purpose of Rogers' theorem in that book is to simplify the proof of another theorem of Erdos.) Filaseta, Ford, Konyagin, Pomerance, and Yu - all highly regarded experts in the field - were unaware of this result when writing their celebrated 2007 solution to #2, and only included a mention of Rogers' theorem after being alerted to it by Tenenbaum. So it is perhaps not inconceivable that even Erdos did not recall Rogers' theorem when preparing his long paper of open questions with Graham in 1980.

(emphasis mine)

I think the value of LLM guided literature searches is pretty clear!","comments":[{"id":46674350,"user":"casey2","time":1768788946,"time_ago":"a month ago","type":"comment","content":"

This whole thread is pretty funny. Either it can demo some pretty clever, but still limited, features resulting in math skills OR it's literally the best search engine ever invented. My guess is the former, it's pretty whatever at web search and I'd expect to see something similar to the easily retrievable, more visible proof method from Rogers' (as opposed to some alleged proof hidden in some dataset).","comments":[{"id":46681084,"user":"CamperBob2","time":1768840972,"time_ago":"a month ago","type":"comment","content":"

Either it can demo some pretty clever, but still limited, features resulting in math skills OR it's literally the best search engine ever invented.

Both are precisely true. It is a better search engine than anything else -- which, while true, is something you won't realize unless you've used the non-free 'pro research' features from Google and/or OpenAI. And it can perform limited but increasingly-capable reasoning about what it finds before presenting the results to the user.

Note that no online Web search or tool usage at all was involved in the recent IMO results. I think a lot of people missed that little detail.","comments":[],"comments_count":0,"level":5,"url":"item?id=46681084"}],"comments_count":1,"level":4,"url":"item?id=46674350"}],"comments_count":2,"level":3,"url":"item?id=46672879"}],"comments_count":4,"level":2,"url":"item?id=46671794"}],"comments_count":5,"level":1,"url":"item?id=46670810"}],"comments_count":6,"level":0,"url":"item?id=46670650"}],"comments_count":7,"url":"item?id=46669234"}

Comment by CamperBob2