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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

If someone spends their entire career not solving the puzzle, did they really learn to understand how to solve it?

They may very well have learned plenty of things and solved or discovered other puzzles, but if the first puzzle is worth pursuing because the solution is actually useful it seems liked we're better off with the solution than a bunch of failed attempts.

That said, I do question the value of solving many of these types of math problems. I'm no mathematician so I'm assuming I'm wrong here, but on the surface many seem mostly theoretical puzzles with little or no practical use.

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Yes? We haven’t solved many puzzles about reality, but even half proofs and conjectures create tools that other people use to make progress.

I’ve made this point elsewhere but the debate here is between two different philosophical positions. Results vs process.

If all you care about is the results then the process doesn’t matter.

If a person is starving or needs medicine, then a long discussion on process is inhumane. They need results.

If the conversation is about process though, then focusing on the results is missing the point.

I’d say the question for results oriented people is what are the benefits of the process and at what point does it make sense to optimize for results vs process.

My read on much of the discussion here is that the debate is whether we want AIs solving problems that career mathematicians may spend a lifetime on and still not solve.

When the topic is about careers the question really has to be about results. Even if the results are made by solving different problems discovered along the way towards their original problem, it still has to be about those results.

There is absolutely a question of whether burning these resources is useful when the only outcome is a solution to a potentially obscure math problem, but that is more a question of prompting and goals rather than the use of these tools themselves.

> There is absolutely a question of whether burning these resources is useful when the only outcome is a solution to a potentially obscure math problem, but that is more a question of prompting and goals rather than the use of these tools themselves.

Could you elaborate?

OpenAI is sharing results that seem to have been based only on prompting to solve math problems. The results could have simply been a limitation of the prompt and goals given, prompting for more broad results other than just the solution.

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