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Comment by autuni | Hacker News Reader

> I have not checked most of the details, but I think that the claimed o(n log n) bound is plausible.

Stopped reading right after that. Why is this so high up on HN? It's literally nothing.

Because it's an interesting case study of how quickly individual top human experts can understand and verify these mostly-autonomous breakthroughs in math and science. In this case, the world expert on integer multiplication algorithms has taken two weeks and only understood a fraction of the generated paper.

that's a fair point and that part is indeed interesting to a degree, and I would fully agree if it wouldn't be stated multiple times that the author did not actually read, i.e., properly engage with, any of the involved papers, but only used an LLM to talk about them. The author also emphasizes that they did not check the proof, or fully believe that the result is feasible. (Yes, I did in fact go back and read it)

I think you may be interpreting the author’s self-deprecating style and gallows humour a little too literally. I took “I have not read the paper” to mean “I have not been able to understand the paper by reading it”, or perhaps “I read the paper but could not follow it”. There’s no doubt that every word on the page did at some point enter the author’s eyeballs.

Because the author is one of the only humans who fully understands the O(n log n) algorithm that this o(n log n) result claims to improve on - he is a co-author of the 2019 O(n log n) breakthrough result.

The expansion (on p3) of the statement after which you stopped reading goes on to explain that one of the issues is that these results have not been delivered in a humanly intelligible form. (“… the maths dump does not appear to be strong on exposition”).

> Stopped reading right after that. > Why is this so high up on HN?

Your question would have been answered if you'd just read a little more

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