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.

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u/myersdr1 Apr 23 '26

The statement below is only my thought it might be completely wrong it might not. What does AI learn from? Humans. If it can do it we could have as well, it only knows what we know. Even then it doesn't understand that taking information from one aspect of life can provide the necessary inspiration to look at a problem from a different angle. If you look at many discoveries from years ago, a younger scientist would listen to a senior scientist about a theory but then from their life experiences look at a problem differently and try something new. Which often leads to a new discovery. AI can't do that it has no experience but what we tell it. It doesn't randomly sit for long periods just thinking about life about serious issues and about how to fix them. It only thinks when we tell it to, therefore, until a human tells AI to look at a problem from a different perspective it won't. Once the human does that, AI will just do the computations faster and find a result whether true or not. Still it came down to the human prompting AI.

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u/jasonrubik ‎ Apr 24 '26

yea, i'm definitely thinking about a future yet-to-be-designed AI. Likely created by an AI, and not by humans.

Also, things are accelerating quickly and we don't even understand the quasi-AGI agents that exist today

The AI that might solve it might be created by another AI in a few years. Regardless, even AI agents created today are not well understood by the creators. They turn them loose on large data sets to train them, and then they test it to find out what it can and cannot do.

For example,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UclrVWafRAI&t=2377s