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Comment by cschmid | Hacker News Reader

I don't normally complain about this, but that result has been at least four times on the front page in the last two weeks:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514642

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424749

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29405380

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29208141

Finding mathematical patterns and relations by fitting expressive functions has actually been a common technique in experimental mathematics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_mathematics) for a while.

In the last few years, neural networks in particular have been used a lot in areas of math related to string theory, where one tries to find structures on certain topological spaces that preserve or generate symmetries of the resulting physics. Here's a review that might be interesting:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06317

Unfortunately, none of these mathematicians have the marketing prowess of a multi-billion dollar company...

View on HN

Just to add some more detail to this. The first link [0] you referenced is one I submitted a while ago. It did not gain much attention and I was not really surprised since the same underlying research was being reported by different sources in variously vague ways.

Anyway, I received an email from HN yesterday saying they wanted to put it on the “second-chance pool” and I could do so by clicking a link to repost it. I never received an email from HN before and I was curious what would happen, so I clicked to repost, and of course it then shot to the top of the front page.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514642

Not only has it been on the front page a bunch; each time it’s posted, it’s further and further through the game of telephone from science to pop journalism, and less and less accurate.

It might be interesting to map the quality of the hn conversations to the distance from the source in either time or internet distance.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

DeepMind’s AI helps untangle the mathematics of knots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514642 - Dec 2021 (61 comments)

DeepMind cracks 'knot' conjecture that bedeviled mathematicians for decades - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466753 - Dec 2021 (3 comments)

Can deep learning help mathematicians build intuition? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424749 - Dec 2021 (28 comments)

Exploring the beauty of pure mathematics in novel ways - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29405380 - Dec 2021 (4 comments)

Mathematicians Find Structure in Biased Polynomials - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29208141 - Nov 2021 (8 comments)

I haven’t seen it yet so it’s alright for me.

This is the dirty secret of reposts. It is only people who spend their lives on HN and see (and somehow remember) every single previous post that care about reposts.

The review paper is really interesting: "Machine-Learning Mathematical Structures"

Thanks for this interesting and readable paper!

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