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Colby Cosh: The mechanical monster storming through an ancient priesthood

AI just solved hundreds of problems, some of which could not be solved by humans in over a century

Oct. 6 will be remembered in mathematics as the day the bomb went off. OpenAI, the San Francisco-based “public benefit corporation” that has been making impressive mathematical advances every few weeks for a while now, unleashed a flood of 377 new machine-generated papers, each of which contains a new result. Literally hundreds of outstanding theoretical conjectures of longstanding interest have been resolved, found true or false, without human intervention.

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Some of these have resisted human solution for decades. (The one known as “Hilbert’s tenth problem” has been partially open since 1900.) No active subfield of higher mathematics is left untouched; the mechanical monster has stormed through the corridors of number theory, algebraic geometry, combinatorics, topology and computing science. And while the degrees of claimed rigour in the new papers vary slightly, the typical reaction of most expert human inquirers into the results they are capable of understanding has been, “Gee, this looks pretty solid,” often with a side of, “I didn’t think of trying that solving strategy back in 2003 when I spent 18 months on this problem.”

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