←back to thread

248 points rishicomplex | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.423s | source
Show context
wslh ◴[] No.42165921[source]
If you were to bet on solving problems like "P versus NP" using these technologies combined with human augmentation (or vice versa), what would be the provable time horizon for achieving such a solution? I think we should assume that the solution is also expressible in the current language of math/logic.
replies(3): >>42166040 #>>42166122 #>>42166182 #
zarzavat ◴[] No.42166122[source]
Probably a bad example, P vs NP is the most likely of the millennium problems to be unsolvable, so the answer may be "never".

I'll bet the most technical open problems will be the ones to fall first. What AIs lack in creativity they make up for in ability to absorb a large quantity of technical concepts.

replies(2): >>42166245 #>>42169785 #
1. meindnoch ◴[] No.42169785[source]
Ok, then the AI should formally prove that it's "unsolvable" (however you meant it).
replies(1): >>42171653 #
2. less_less ◴[] No.42171653[source]
Unsolvable would mean that no proof exists, and no disproof exists, in whatever axiom system (eg ZF). While in some cases you can hack around this by proving eg "no proof and no disproof exist in ZF, if ZF is consistent", IIUC that's not always possible. It's like asking "when will AI be strong enough that it can always decide correctly whether a given computer program halts?"

Then again, it's fairly likely that P=?NP is decidable but we just don't have any idea how to prove it. In that case the question is more or less "what's the time horizon until AI is vastly better than humans at formal math?", to which the answer is certainly "we don't know, there may be obstacles, just wait and see".