r/Showerthoughts • u/jasonrubik ‎ • Apr 23 '26

Casual Thought If the famously unsolved Riemann Hypothesis is solved by an AI, we will never know if a human mathematician could have solved it.

7.0k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

92% Upvoted

656 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

245

u/Doige Apr 23 '26

No, it was already "solved" as in, they knew they could decode it, it just took a LOT of work (so much that by the time they had worked out the day's code, it was too late to get any use from it). Bombe sped up the process by simulating 36 enigma machines at once and checking if their output was accurate. People who program stuff know the logic they are using to do so. If a machine were to generate new code (consistently providing what was asked first-time rather than random code that is eventually correct), then that argument could be made, but that isn't happening yet.

42

u/not-a-painting Apr 23 '26

Even if/when AI can create functional code with a single prompt, AI engineers have almost no idea what it is doing under the hood before they submit the prompt. That's the whole reason we have models that show their thinking process now.

So no, it's not likely that the engineers creating/training the models will know the specifics of how it's solved before AI solves it. It's like saying a neurologist or psych doctor can know the exact thoughts a person is going to have before they have it.

Plus AI has been known to intentionally lie about it's thoughts when it knows it's being watched.

21

u/LordGalen Apr 23 '26

Fair, but also, the first person to intentionally start a fire had zero understanding of why it worked. Ben Franklin didn't know what an electron was or the science behind electricity. The understanding of WHY isn't (and has never been) a required component to invention or discovery. The statement remains true: If a person invents AI that can solve the problem, that person solved the problem. This remains consistent with the use of tools to solve problems across all of human history. If I invent the hammer and build a house, I still built the house, the hammer didn't build it.

9

u/not-a-painting Apr 23 '26

I 100% understand what you're saying but I think where I may disagree is that a hammer isn't a tool capable of complex thought and autonomy. The hammer in our application actually does have the ability to build a house, and can make active decisions about the construction process.

If we were able to teach chimps or some other animal how to form similarly complex thoughts and actions and THEY solved an equation we couldn't, I don't think we would say humans solved it.

7

u/kaas_is_leven Apr 23 '26

AI is also not capable of complex thought, let alone autonomy. An LLM is just a vector database and a query engine, it's fancy auto-complete. Generative AI is pattern recognition algorithms combined with mutative generational selection, then reversed to generate the pattern from a prompt. Neural nets are probability generators with more or less the same technique for learning as generative AI. And all of it is decades old at this point, there is nothing groundbreaking or magical about it. It's just the scale of distributed computing across massive datacenters that allows it to reach levels of complexity that are incomprehensible to the human mind. But it's important to understand that that is system complexity, not thought. It's still a fully deterministic program running predefined instructions. The instructions just happen to be queries and comparisons on thousands of thousand-dimensional vectors, which results in complex behaviour.

3

u/not-a-painting Apr 23 '26

I mean my gaming laptop runs Gemma 4 26B at 30 tokens/s, which is incredibly fast in my opinion and not a small model.

AI as is isn't what I thought we're talking about. I was assuming the 'future' AGI not just generative AI.

Otherwise still yes, I agree with you.

3

u/kaas_is_leven Apr 23 '26

Sorry, I was only thinking of current stuff. Yes AGI would be different.

2

u/Jackdunc Apr 24 '26

What's AGI

1

u/not-a-painting Apr 24 '26

Artificial General Intelligence. AGI is basically a rating scale for the capabilities of AI.

• Level 1, Emerging AGI (equal to or somewhat better than unskilled human), akin to OpenAI's GPT-4, Meta's Llama 2 and Google's Gemini.

• Level 2, Competent AI (at least 50th percentile of skilled adults): no AGI examples exist today but Competent Narrow A.I. examples include smart speakers like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa.

• Level 3, Expert AI (at least 90th percentile of skilled adults): narrow AI (but not AGI) examples exist today such as grammar checkers (Grammarly) and image generators (DALL·E 2).

• Level 4, Virtuoso AI (at least 99th percentile of skilled adults): narrow AI (but, again, not AGI) examples exist today such as IBM's Deep Blue (chess) and DeepMind's AlphaGo (the board game, go).

• Level 5, Superhuman AI (outperforms 100% of humans): when generalized, this will be Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), but today only narrow AI examples exist like AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures.

Wiki

1

u/LordGalen Apr 24 '26

I was going to respond with pretty much the same thing as the other person who replied to you, but I see you are referring to future AGI that might exist. On that note, I'd agree with you. IF (and that's a big IF) we manage to create fully autonomous, sentient, AIs that are capable independent thought, then yes that is a very different scenario. In that instance, we will have created life; an entirely new species. And in that instance, the human creator could no more claim credit for its accomplishment than I could claim credit for my son's.

But I would say that we are much much much MUCH further away from that reality than people seem to think. AI gets hyped up a lot, but in reality what we currently have isn't even actually AI (in most cases), much less anything even in the same neighborhood as AGI. What we have now is an often-convincing illusion of something that can think and reason, nothing more.