From Suno composing uncanny elevator music to Tilly Norwood delivering customer-service-inflected one-liners, artificial intelligence has rattled creative industries. You can add math to the list after OpenAI said that, using thousands of agents, it had solved a decades-old puzzle known as the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem.
\n\n“The artists and the musicians have already gone through this,” says Juspreet Singh Sandhu, a mathematician at Colorado State University.
\n\nDespite what timed high school exams might have you believe, mathematicians aren’t focused on getting the right answer as fast as possible. In fact, contrary to math’s image as a practical subject, the development of new mathematical ideas often resembles artistic exploration, akin to inventing a game or puzzle. Mathematicians typically follow a thoughtful, deliberate process to develop their ideas. In contrast, OpenAI approached the proof with brute force, which shortcut the process in a way that threatens to undermine human understanding.
\n\n“A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns,” wrote the English mathematician G. H. Hardy in his 1940 essay, A Mathematician’s Apology. As Hardy describes it, a painter uses shapes and colors, and a poet uses words, while a mathematician constructs patterns out of ideas.
\n\nA pacifist…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/