[HN Gopher] AI maths whiz creates tough new problems for humans ...
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       AI maths whiz creates tough new problems for humans to solve
        
       Author : tzury
       Score  : 131 points
       Date   : 2021-02-06 06:37 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | David147 wrote:
       | The two blog posts by Frank Calegari are from July 2019 and
       | irrelevant to the paper in Nature (from February 2021). The paper
       | went through peer review by mathematicians and experts in the
       | field.
        
         | alisonkisk wrote:
         | What was changed in the new paper? Hard to say "irrelevant"
         | when the blog post directly influenced a rewrite of the paper.
        
           | scihive wrote:
           | There are several new conjectures related to the Catalan
           | constant, pi^2, and zeta(3) (Apery's constant):
           | 
           | http://www.ramanujanmachine.com/wp-
           | content/uploads/2020/06/c...
           | 
           | http://www.ramanujanmachine.com/wp-
           | content/uploads/2020/06/p...
           | 
           | http://www.ramanujanmachine.com/wp-
           | content/uploads/2020/06/z...
           | 
           | From looking at Calegari's blog post, he didn't comment on
           | any them so far...
        
             | [deleted]
        
       | bluepoint wrote:
       | To be fair creating mathematical problems that are hard or
       | impossible to solve is not really very hard.
        
       | CyberRabbi wrote:
       | > "Until I can detect a well-developed 'sense of mathematical
       | taste' in AI, I expect its role to be that of an important
       | auxiliary tool, not that of independent discoverer."
       | 
       | AI, no, but ML, yes. ML can only make estimates, e.g. compute
       | functions, it doesn't have judgement. That requires a human
       | decision maker. It goes back to what I learned in primary school
       | about computers: "a computer can only do what you tell it to do."
        
       | magnio wrote:
       | The GitHub repo contains more details on how the algorithm works:
       | https://github.com/AnonGit90210/RamanujanMachine
       | 
       | > We have continued fractions which are generated by polynomials.
       | What does that mean? object of the type:
       | a(0)+b(1)/(a(1)+b(2)/...)) where a,b are polynomials with integer
       | coefficients. This is the RHS. On the LHS we have a function of
       | some constant, either rational or ULCD. A ULCD function is of the
       | type f(const)=(u/const + const/l + c)/d while a rational function
       | is the ratio of two polynomials. We seek for a match between some
       | LHS function on a constant to a continued fraction. To do this,
       | we enumerate over the coefficients of a,b and those of the
       | rational func on the LHS/the ulcd parameters. They're all
       | integers. We actually don't compare between the LHS to a
       | continued fraction, but to a continued fraction after we applied
       | some function to it, e.g. contfrac^2, sqrt(contfrac), 1/contfrac
       | etc. In order to enhance the algorithm's complexity, we first
       | enumerate over the parameters of the RHS, saving the results to a
       | hashtable, then enumerate over the LHS and look for a match in
       | the table. This is a TMTO (time-memory tradeoff), it's called
       | MITM (meet in the middle), you can look it up if it's not clear.
       | We first find matches, then filter redundant results (discussed
       | later on), filter only continued fractions that converge fastly,
       | find how fast they are converging, and how many iterations we
       | should calculate to get the desired precision. We calculate them
       | to that precision, and filter again.
       | 
       | This doesn't seems that complicated, but at the same time
       | probably gives no mathematical insights as to how to derive those
       | formulaes. I can see how this would look pointless to some
       | people.
        
       | warent wrote:
       | THIS is mind-bendingly awesome. What are the implications of this
       | for technological advancement? Will we be getting to a point
       | where machines are inventing new things that revolutionize life
       | as we know it? I'm thinking about the difference in technology
       | from now vs. 1920s. Could we be moving toward another advancement
       | leap of such a proportion?
       | 
       | Just consider for a moment how far we've come. In the past, all
       | our machines were purely mechanical---steam engines, water
       | cranks, etc. Now we're creating machines that discover math.
       | Amazing!
        
         | bawolff wrote:
         | The singularity is not yet upon us, and we have had machines
         | generating math since the 70s with the proof of the 4 colour
         | theorem.
        
         | trenchgun wrote:
         | It is intellectual scam.
        
         | layoutIfNeeded wrote:
         | Yaay! I fucking love science(tm) too!
        
           | dang wrote:
           | " _Don 't be snarky._"
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
         | colordrops wrote:
         | It does seem like an amazing project, but I'm struggling to see
         | how this has any significant implications for technological
         | advancement.
        
         | FrozenVoid wrote:
         | Its just a continued fraction generator that looks for
         | fractions equal to constants. Not an AI, more like search
         | function with optimization.
        
       | heinrichf wrote:
       | The praise from popular press and the promotion by the authors
       | should be put into context of what mathematicians think of it.
       | 
       | Two blog posts by a professor at U. Chicago, qualifying it of
       | intellectual fraud:
       | 
       | https://www.galoisrepresentations.com/2019/07/17/the-ramanuj...
       | 
       | https://www.galoisrepresentations.com/2019/07/07/en-passant-...
        
         | QuesnayJr wrote:
         | This is shocking stuff. I encourage everyone to read these two
         | links.
        
         | 0b01 wrote:
         | I agree with the article you linked. Mathematical knowledge is
         | about compression. Most if not all of these formulae are just
         | specializations of known formulae. So the value of this
         | approach is questionable. Generating these forms can possibly
         | be done in a much simpler way.
        
           | agumonkey wrote:
           | who else holds the compression view ?
        
         | David147 wrote:
         | Looking at his post, the main criticism is "that the program
         | has not yet generated anything new", but the post does not
         | refer to the actual results (like formulas for Catalan's and
         | Apery's constants).
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | dealforager wrote:
         | Man, this is an example of how difficult it is to know what is
         | BS or not if you're not an expert on the subject. On one hand,
         | this article was published in Nature, which I thought was
         | trustworthy. On the other, there's this comment on a social
         | media platform that links to a blog that also seems legit. No
         | wonder misinformation spreads so fast. Even after reading both,
         | I don't know what to make of it. The reaction and comments here
         | just confuse me more.
        
           | omginternets wrote:
           | Science/Nature are prestigious, but the quality of their
           | articles are often questionable. Part of the problem is the
           | short format, which makes it difficult to include a lot of
           | context and sanity-checking. Another issue is that they
           | prioritize the "sexiness" of the research over pretty much
           | everything else.
        
             | throwawaygh wrote:
             | I'll never understand why Science/Nature carry any currency
             | in CS and Math. TBH I consider them negative signals in
             | these fields, and I encourage others to do the same when
             | hiring -- the same way that a prestigious newspaper or
             | magazine would treat someone with a bunch of (non-news)
             | Buzzfeed bylines.
             | 
             | There are some exceptions. E.g., a Science/Nature paper
             | summarizing several years worth of papers published in
             | "real" venues. Truly novel work that's reported on for the
             | first time in Nature/Science is almost universally garbage.
             | At least in CS/Math.
        
               | kevinventullo wrote:
               | In my experience, at least in pure math, publishing in
               | Nature/Science doesn't carry any weight. The most
               | prestigious journals for a given subfield usually
               | specialize in that subfield (with a name like _Journal of
               | Geometric Topology_ ), with a few exceptions like Annals
               | and JAMS. Even those are still focused heavily on pure
               | math; I can't think of any which are cross-disciplinary
               | outside of math.
        
           | kevinventullo wrote:
           | FWIW that blog is written by one of the top leading number
           | theorists in the US today. Of course, his opinions are his
           | and you're free to form your own, but just wanted to clarify
           | that the blog is very much legit.
        
             | David147 wrote:
             | It seems like Calegari is chasing after PR and may be angry
             | at computer scientists getting into his field.
             | 
             | His criticism was discussed and found incorrect by the peer
             | review process:
             | 
             | https://static-
             | content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
        
               | alisonkisk wrote:
               | The authors tweeted at Elon Musk and Yuri Milner, so it's
               | obvious who is chasing PR (and "dumb money")
               | 
               | Meanwhile, the blog author congratulated Mathematica for
               | being for being good at solving continued fractions
               | 
               | I'd ask you where the criticism was "found to be
               | incorrect", but I know that's absurd (aka, not even
               | wrong), as peer review comments are not in the business
               | of "finding criticism to be incorrect".
        
               | wefaewofj wrote:
               | Assuming that it's the PI/senior author doing all of this
               | shameless promotional work, I feel really REALLY bad for
               | the grad student(s) on this paper... what a way to start
               | your academic career :(
               | 
               | The paper is actually really nice work, but holy jesus
               | someone on that author list is making a complete ass out
               | of themselves.
               | 
               | Academia isn't startup world. The community is small,
               | people have long memories, and I've rarely seen the
               | strategy being deployed here work out. It does work
               | sometimes, but more often it backfires. Especially for
               | folks who aren't yet on a tenure track.
        
               | spekcular wrote:
               | This is an incredibly strange slate of reviewers. Only
               | the first seems to really understand the mathematical
               | context. It's odd to appeal to the peer review process
               | when the "peers" are not suited to complete the review.
               | 
               | I assure you that Calegari knows more about number theory
               | than any of those referees, and the reasons why the paper
               | is bad are well-explained on his blog (cf. the two links
               | above) and by referee #1. Speaking of "peer review," look
               | at how all the excellent mathematicians commenting on
               | that blog agree with him!
        
               | scihive wrote:
               | Calegari gets to cherry-pick comments he approves or
               | rejects on his blog, so calling it "peer review" is
               | taking the concept out of context =).
        
               | timkam wrote:
               | I agree. Without being an expert in the field, the 2nd
               | and 3rd reviews "smell funny"; they clearly lack depth,
               | are very enthusiastic, and don't seem to make a good and
               | comprehensive point as to _why_ this paper is supposed to
               | be as great as they claim it is. In a strong community,
               | any editor should consider these reviews disappointing,
               | and any author should at least have mixed feelings about
               | them.
        
           | testfoobar wrote:
           | This is why I have empathy for conspiracy believers. From
           | their perspective, their understanding of the world is
           | accurate.
           | 
           | This is also why I see the inevitable failure of social media
           | platforms in regulating truth-vs-non-truth.
        
           | TeMPOraL wrote:
           | This phenomenon has a name: epistemic learned helplessness.
           | 
           | https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-
           | learn...
        
           | QuesnayJr wrote:
           | Nature in particular seems vulnerable to the academic
           | equivalent of click-bait articles. I think the top journals
           | within a specific field are more reliable.
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | Nature has published some very questionable papers in AI/ML
           | that are filled with malpractices. Another bogus paper that
           | comes to mind was predicting earthquakes with a deep(read
           | huge) neural network that appears to have information leakage
           | and was fuelled with the hype of DL when a simple logistic
           | regression (i.e. single neuron) could perform just as well
           | [1,2,3].
           | 
           | [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/c4ylga/
           | d_m...
           | 
           | [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/c8zf14/
           | d_w...
           | 
           | [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1582-8 /
           | https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.01983.pdf
        
             | lumost wrote:
             | This is a frighteningly common practice in DL research.
             | Baselines are rarely taken with resect to alternate
             | techniques, largely due to publication bias.
             | 
             | On one hand papers about DL applications are of interest to
             | the DL community, and useful to see if there is promise in
             | the technique. On the other hand, they may not be
             | particularly useful to industry, or to forwarding broader
             | research goals.
        
               | throwawaygh wrote:
               | A good rule of thumb is to be slightly more suspicious of
               | "DL for X" unless X was part of the AI/ML umbrella in the
               | 2000s. If no one was publishing about X in AAAI/NIPS/ICML
               | before 2013 or so then there's a pretty good chance that
               | "DL for X" is ignoring 30+ years of work on X. This is
               | becoming less true if one of the paper's senior author
               | comes from the field where "X" is traditionally studied.
               | 
               | Another good rule of thumb is that physicists writing DL
               | papers about "DL for X" where X is not physics are
               | especially terrible about arrogantly ignoring 30+ years
               | of deeply related research. I don't quite understand why,
               | but there's an epidemic of physicists dabbling in CS/AI
               | and hyping it way the hell up.
        
               | lumost wrote:
               | Anecdotally, having come from a physics background myself
               | - DL is more similar to the math that physicists are used
               | to than traditional ML techniques or even standard comp-
               | sci approaches are. In combination with the universal
               | approximation proofs of DL, it's easy to get carried away
               | and think that DL should be _the_ supervised ML
               | technique.
               | 
               | Curiously, having also spent heavy time on traditional
               | data-structures and algorithms gave me an appreciation
               | for how stupendously inefficient a neural net is and part
               | of me cringes whenever I see a one-hot encoding starting
               | point...
        
               | throwawaygh wrote:
               | Re: similar to the math they know, this makes sense.
               | 
               | I don't understand why over-hyping and over-selling is so
               | common with AI/ML/DL work (to be fair, over-hyping is
               | more related to AI than physicists in particular. But
               | people from non-CS fields get themselves into extra
               | trouble perhaps because they don't realize there are old-
               | ish subfields dedicated to very similar problems to the
               | ones they're working on.)
        
               | PartiallyTyped wrote:
               | I think the answer is related to the startup culture, and
               | that is to gather funding.
        
               | throwawaygh wrote:
               | That's the confusing thing. Appealing to rich twitter
               | users/journalists/the public doesn't strike me as a
               | particularly good strategy for raising research funds!
               | 
               | Random rich people rarely fund individual researchers.
               | More common for them to fund an institute (perhaps even
               | by starting a new one). The institute then awards grants
               | based on recommendations from a panel of experts. This
               | was true before Epstein scandals, and now I cannot
               | imagine a decent university signing off on random one-off
               | funding streams from rich people.
               | 
               | All gov funding goes through panels of experts.
               | 
               | Listening to random rich people or journalists or the
               | public just isn't how those panels of experts work. Over-
               | hyping work by eg tweeting at rich/famous people or
               | getting a bunch of news articles published is in fact a
               | good way to turn off exactly the people who decide which
               | scientists get money.
               | 
               | Maybe a particularly clueless/hapless PR person at the
               | relevant university (or at Nature) is creating a mess for
               | the authors?
        
               | PartiallyTyped wrote:
               | While I agree with you, the nature paper that I linked
               | above was published by the folks at google of all places.
               | I think a valid hypothesis is that work done during
               | internships (or even residencies) may not be on-par with
               | what NeurIPS/ICLR/etc require but they give publicity and
               | thus the PR teams push for that kind of papers.
               | 
               | However, it still does note explain why this kind of
               | sloppy work done and published by publicly funded
               | research labs, except perhaps as a form of advertisement.
        
               | throwawaygh wrote:
               | Well, yeah, corporate research is what it is. A lot of
               | the value add is marketing.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | PartiallyTyped wrote:
               | I agree with the sibling comment that whenever ML has not
               | been used before on in a field and DL and especially DRL
               | (deep reinforcement learning) are used, it is likely that
               | the authors are ignoring decades of good research in ML.
               | 
               | After a very theoretical grad course in ML, I have come
               | to appreciate other tools that come with many theoretical
               | guarantees and even built-in regularization that are less
               | Grad Student Descent and more understanding the field.
               | 
               | I think that the hype that was used to gather funding in
               | DL is getting projected onto other fields, if only to
               | gather more funding.
        
           | bawolff wrote:
           | The articles don't contradict each other when it comes to
           | cited facts - you can believe both!
           | 
           | I suppose its all in the implications though, which are
           | contradicting as the nature article implies it is a big deal.
           | The nature article doesn't give any examples of interesting
           | conjectures, or examples of interesting consequences if any
           | of the conjectures should be true. They talk a lot about
           | alternate formulae to calculate things we already know how to
           | calculate. Why would we care? Do they have a smaller big-oh?
           | Nature references the theory of links between other areas of
           | math, if true that's great, but if its true surely they would
           | have mentioned an example of such a link? Anyways I lean
           | towards this not being that interesting, even if you base
           | that just on what the nature article said.
        
             | sanxiyn wrote:
             | Re why would we care: this is a search algorithm for
             | numerical coincidences. Most numerical coincidences are
             | trivial, for example can be derived from hypergeometric
             | function relation which was known to Gauss. In fact it
             | would be interesting to automatically filter formulae which
             | can be derived from hypergeometric function relation... On
             | the other hand, numerical coincidences can lead to deep
             | theory, monstrous moonshine is a prime example. Hope is
             | that by searching for numerical coincidences, we can
             | discover one leading to deep theory without already knowing
             | that deep theory. This seems reasonable.
        
               | yharris wrote:
               | That's a very good point - and it really motivates these
               | kinds of computer searches.
               | 
               | The Nature paper has quite a lot of detail in its
               | supplementary
               | 
               | https://static-
               | content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
               | 
               | Table 3 inside also shows new conjectures for constants
               | such as Catalan's and zeta(3). These results do not seem
               | to trivially arise from known knowledge.
        
           | zests wrote:
           | Sometimes popular science is itself the misinformation. The
           | authors stretch the findings to land in prestigious journals.
           | The news stretches the findings further to sell clicks (c.f.
           | Gell-Mann Amnesia effect). The people on the internet
           | selectively quote articles and selectively ignore others. The
           | algorithm tries to only show you content that you like.
           | 
           | The truth doesn't have a chance.
        
         | catgary wrote:
         | Look at the comments:
         | 
         | > The paper is amazingly bad. None of the authors are
         | mathematicians as far as I can see. I think the word "new"
         | appears 50+ times in the paper. Looks like they updated the
         | paper to include your observation from last time about the
         | Gauss continued fraction without mentioning the source (the
         | authors admit here they read your blog:
         | http://www.ramanujanmachine.com/idea/some-well-known-
         | results...). Classy!
         | 
         | Just some light plagiarism/academic misconduct!
        
         | Radim wrote:
         | Ah yes, the good old "SV culture disrupts X! Revolution at 8
         | o'clock!"
         | 
         | There's an arms race:
         | 
         | * People are evolving _memetic resistance_ to the incessant BS,
         | ads and bombastic headlines.
         | 
         | * The SV/startup culture is evolving to inject _authenticity_
         | to overcome people 's BS defenses, convince them they need a
         | change.
         | 
         | Honestly, do you still get excited when you read "AI solves
         | X!"?
         | 
         | Probably another huckster peddling empty air, cutting corners,
         | externalizing costs. The whole game is tired, and people are
         | taking note. Not everything that exists requires a radical
         | change.
        
         | mxcrossb wrote:
         | > Well ... OK I guess? But, pretty much exactly as pointed out
         | last time, not only is the proof only one line, but the nature
         | of the proof makes clear exactly how unoriginal this is to
         | mathematics
         | 
         | This is what I was wondering about while reading the article.
         | If the AI only generates formula for which proofs involve only
         | a few trivial steps back to something that is known, then it
         | doesn't feel useful. But I feel like the question "what makes a
         | good conjecture?" in its own right makes for a very interesting
         | discussion.
        
           | bawolff wrote:
           | Wouldn't a good conjecture be anything that's interesting if
           | true. General bonus points for if intuitively it seems like
           | it should be obviously true (or false) but yet is hard to
           | prove or if proving it is true would allow you to prove lots
           | of other interesting statements.
        
             | alisonkisk wrote:
             | Sure. Define "interesting".
             | 
             | What's interesting to me is probably in a standard textbook
             | already.
        
               | bawolff wrote:
               | If it is in a standard textbook, than its almost
               | certainly interesting (although probably not a conjecture
               | unless its a pretty advanced textbook)
        
           | prof-dr-ir wrote:
           | Mathematical physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf has got you covered:
           | 
           | https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-subtle-art-of-the-
           | mathema...
        
         | j7ake wrote:
         | I think one interesting lesson from this nice qualification
         | here is that at the moment ML methods to learn mathematics may
         | look trivial from a professional mathematician (ie the results
         | are unoriginal or trivial) but perhaps the target audience of
         | this method may be for non professional mathematicians or
         | students training to be mathematicians. I could still see this
         | ML tool as a way to automate the work of some more "trivial"
         | (from the POV of an expert) mathematics, although not the work
         | of professional mathematicians.
         | 
         | The knowledge gap in mathematics between professional
         | mathematicians and non professionals is vast, and this tool
         | could narrow the gap.
         | 
         | I would bet the majority of readers of nature would not be able
         | to point out that the outputs of the ML tool were trivial. So
         | there is need to narrow this gap.
        
           | alisonkisk wrote:
           | Simple results in almost any specialist field would stump
           | most readers of Nature. That's not a reason to publish in
           | Nature.
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | boriselec wrote:
         | I understand his frustration. But calling it a fraud is a
         | little bit too much.
        
         | yharris wrote:
         | Full disclosure- I am one of the authors of the paper.
         | 
         | Note that the blog you're citing was written a year and a half
         | ago. It refers to a select few conjectures, and naturally has
         | no references to the developments in the past year and half
         | (which were the main reason the paper got published).
         | 
         | Furthermore, the author of the blog didn't respond to multiple
         | emails we sent him, attempting to discuss the actual
         | mathematics.
         | 
         | So basically the vast majority of the criticism here, is based
         | on a single, outdated blog, by a professor (respected as he may
         | be) who has not revisited the issues and new results since
         | first posting the blog, and has not given any mathematical
         | argument as to why the results shown in the paper (the actual
         | updated paper that was published) are supposably unimportant.
         | 
         | Would appreciate your opinions on the matter.
        
           | _8091149529 wrote:
           | Not the person you're replying to, but I admit to
           | characterizing your paper as "garbage" in another comment
           | thread. Since you're inviting discourse, which I greatly
           | appreciate, I'm compelled to reply.
           | 
           | 1) To anyone who's studied algebra, it is clear that
           | identities of the form LHS = RHS can be obtained by a nested
           | application of transformations and substitutions in a
           | consistent manner.
           | 
           | 2) Of course, arriving at a new, insightful result often
           | involves taking mundane steps. However, in this case, the new
           | mathematical discoveries based on the output tableaus of your
           | algorithm are hypothetical. Whereas the manuscript (and the
           | authors) have already pocketed one of the premium accolades
           | in sciences in the form of a Nature publication.
           | 
           | 3) To drive the point above home, do you think the resulting
           | mathematical insights themselves, without riding on the "AI"
           | novelty aspect, would clear the bar for a Nature (or similar
           | high-impact) publication? To be clear, I'm not a
           | mathematican, but I believe the answer would be no. Contrast
           | this with another AI/ML advance published in Nature quite
           | recently: AlphaGo. Note how the gist of their paper,
           | superhuman performance in Go, is a self-standing achievement
           | that merely makes use of machine learning techniques.
        
             | throwawaygh wrote:
             | "garbage" and "fraud" are really strong words.
             | 
             | I would give the actual work behind this paper a "strong
             | accept" if the claims were properly scoped, perhaps with a
             | weak/borderline score on "significance/impact" since I'm
             | not really sure why anyone cares about discovering
             | discovering these sorts of identities. Probably a
             | Conditional Accept in its current form because of the
             | mismatch between actual results + reasonable expectation of
             | potential vs. what's claimed.
             | 
             | So, "over-hyped" and "claims wildly out of line with actual
             | results" are definitely more than fair statements. "Fraud"
             | or "garbage" are way too strong.
             | 
             | Re: Nature, I don't really understand it or care. I can say
             | that in my own input to hiring committees I tend to treat
             | Nature papers in CS/Math as red flags unless they're
             | consolidations of a bunch of other work published in top
             | sub-field journals/conferences.
             | 
             | For some reason Nature really loves these "automated
             | discovery of random mathematical facts" type of papers. I
             | don't understand it. I tend to assume it's click-through-
             | rate-driven editorial decision making.
        
           | timkam wrote:
           | I think the vast majority of criticism here does not target
           | the research per se, but rather the way the results are
           | "hyped" and presented as a massive break-through. I agree
           | with this criticism, and also think that the two positive
           | Nature reviews seem rather shallow, at least from a non-
           | expert's perspective (this is not your fault, of course).
           | When it comes to long term impact, I'd find it interesting to
           | discuss how your work can (ideally) interact with proof
           | assistants like Lean. Also, the work around Lean is a good
           | example of a "hyped" topic that is presented by its
           | contributors with caution and modesty.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | sradman wrote:
       | The Nature article is about [1]:
       | 
       | > The Ramanujan Machine is a computer algorithm, named after the
       | Indian mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan, which generates
       | conjectures similar to what proposed by Ramanujan.
       | 
       | The #Criticism section states:
       | 
       | > Prof. Frank Calegari criticized the Ramanujan Machine claiming
       | that the program has not yet generated anything new and dubbed it
       | as "absurd" and an "intellectual fraud".
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan_Machine
        
         | David147 wrote:
         | Funny that no other name other than Frank Calegari's appear in
         | the Wikipedia page
        
         | heinrichf wrote:
         | This page appears as if it was written by the authors or the PR
         | department of the university...
        
       | tuyguntn wrote:
       | no examples of formula's generated by AI and if they are correct
       | or proven incorrect? Without examples this seems an advertisement
       | to non-existing product. Anyone can create AI then with simple
       | function pick_N_random(=, +, -, *, /, pi, e, alpha, tetta,
       | 1,2,3,4,5,6,...)
        
         | buryat wrote:
         | the link to the project is in the article
        
         | imhoguy wrote:
         | AI? Much overused buzzword these days. Don't we have
         | metaheuristics (genetic algorithms etc.) which already do
         | exactly what the article states as novel?
        
           | batterylow wrote:
           | Meta-heuristics aren't the current buzzword, likewise
           | evolutionary algorithms won't be front paging anytime soon...
           | unless it's neuroevolution disguised as a novel contribution
           | in 2021. Sprinkle on some blockchain and you're onto a
           | winner!
        
       | jzer0cool wrote:
       | TLDR;
       | 
       | AI machine called: Ramanujan Machine.
       | 
       | Attempts at finding formula. Tries to determine whether the
       | following constants are "irrational" or "rational" number.
       | 
       | Constants mentioned: Catalan's constant, Apery's constant
       | 
       | Unrelated: I never heard of the above 2 constants before.
       | Although, I have met someone who speaks Catalan and from
       | Catalonia.
        
         | tecleandor wrote:
         | That names comes from the Belgian mathematician Eugene Charles
         | Catalan.
        
       | David411 wrote:
       | The paper offers new and improved convergence rates for the
       | Catalan constant, presenting new results in a short period of
       | time.
       | 
       | Calegari talking nonsense..
        
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