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6 posts
this phenomena facinates me. why does everyone feel the sudden need to understand this particular conjecture / proof? (not talking about Tao, but about the interest/attention his explanation and others receive). why does the fact that AI proved a thing makes understanding the thing more important somehow?
A must read follow up of the Jacobian Conjecture by Dr Tao https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/a-digestion-of-the-jacobian-conjecture-counterexample/
@yoavgo When something is (dis)proven by explicit example, it is standard to expect that there's an idea that motivates why you did that specific computation / why you came up with that specific example. Sometimes the answer is just "brute force search," but when its not ppl want to know
I think it's a combination of 1. the openai one published the thought process while the anthropic one didn't 2. the counter example feels weird and magical 3. it was a widely believed to be true conjecture, so it being false has some downstream ramifications 4. anthropic hasn't shown interest in frontier math in the same way, so it's cool to think about this result of theirs
but i dont think this is what the post is explaining, no? i mean, if the question is "hmm how did Fable do it, is there a structure that helped it" i totally understand, but the question seems to be "i don't understand this counterexample, help me understand the underlying logic". and this i dont get -- why the urge to understand this particular one?
@andrew_n_carr hmm this is not what i meant though. i am very interested in these questions. what i have zero interest in (but many others seem to have a lot) is to better mathematically understand the conjecture itself. i didnt even heard of it until yesterday, why should i care now?
@yoavgo I don鈥檛 underhand the distinction you are drawing.