Comment by Nemant
19 hours ago
Can someone with a math background explain the significance of these and previous problems that have been solved by AI?
Does some real problem get solved in physics, chemistry, biology, materials, etc? Or are these fun puzzles for mathematicians with not much real world impact? Eg solving the 8 queen problem in leetcode.
Many of these latest results are very important to theoretical math. Some are also theoretical physics and CS.
Real-world applications are far off, but developing mathematical understanding does tend to leak over into applied physics and CS.
A cynic might say this is all just intellectual games, and though there's a grain of truth, it's too cynical imho. This isn't like 8 queens where there's no hope for applications or generalizations. A lot of this stuff fundamentally affects our understanding of how numbers and systems behave, what are the limits of computation, etc.
Even if someone doesn't care about theoretical results, it's still exciting that AI has become superhuman in a domain as broad as math. That shows there's potential to be superhuman in other domains as well.