Mathematical AI

The trick usually comes before the proof. That is not how most AI demos are staged, of course. The demo asks a model a difficult question, the model produces a long answer, and everyone pretends length is evidence of thought. Mathematics is less polite. A proof can be long, fluent, and wrong. It can also be short because the solver noticed the one move that makes the rest almost mechanical. ...

Mistakes are cheap now. That is both the promise and the problem of modern AI research. A large language model can produce a plausible derivation, a plausible proof, a plausible business plan, and a plausible explanation of why the previous three are brilliant. This is useful, until one remembers that “plausible” is the favorite costume of “wrong.” ...