Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem
Knuth Claude's Cycles note update: problem now fully solved, by LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47306926 - March 2026 (2 comments)
https://chatgpt.com/share/69aaab4b-888c-8003-9a02-d1df80f9c7...
Claude's Cycles [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230710 - March 2026 (362 comments)
I've always said this but AI will win a fields medal before being able to manage a McDonald's.
Math seems difficult to us because it's like using a hammer (the brain) to twist in a screw (math).
LLMs are discovering a lot of new math because they are great at low depth high breadth situations.
I predict that in the future people will ditch LLMs in favor of AlphaGo style RL done on Lean syntax trees. These should be able to think on much larger timescales.
Any professional mathematician will tell you that their arsenal is ~ 10 tricks. If we can codify those tricks as latent vectors it's GG
But are you ok with the trendline of ai improvement? The speed of improvement indicates humans will only get further and further removed from the loop.
I see posts like your all the time comforting themselves that humans still matter, and every-time people like you are describing a human owning an ever shrinking section of the problem space.
mean_mistreater