Visionary guy! just like the one who predicted the Earth would flip its physical poles by 2005

I've had the nice experience of teaching my younger brother chess and as he made those bad blunders I started to remember when I played the same and made me happy. We like to review his games together and have a laugh at the shit moves and crack jokes like "killing a fly with a bazooka".

So I would like to know what you guys enjoyed re-living and teaching.

AI Disproves 80-Year-Old Erdős Conjecture

OpenAI announced on May 20 that one of its AI models disproved a conjecture posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946, solving what's known as the planar unit distance problem.

Image: nature.com - AI cracks 80-year-old mathematics challenge

The problem asks: given a set of points on a plane, how many pairs can be exactly the same distance apart? Erdős showed that larger grids could contain same-distance pairs growing slightly faster than the number of points, and he conjectured no arrangement could do better. For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed him.

OpenAI's model proved otherwise. It used techniques from algebraic number theory to discover a new family of point arrangements that breaks the limit Erdős proposed, according to Nature. The system chose points with coordinates that were solutions to particular equations, finding constructions that outperform square grids.

Image: OpenAI - An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

"If Erdős were alive, I am sure that he would just be raving about this advance," said Tom Trotter, a mathematician at Georgia Tech who co-authored papers with Erdős, per Nature.

Sebastien Bubeck, a mathematician at OpenAI, said he believes this is the first time AI has autonomously produced a significant result in any research field. The proof came from a single prompt, a machine-rewritten statement of Erdős's question. "It's kind of remarkable to see the model really reasoning through the problem like a human," said OpenAI mathematician Mehtaab Swahney.

Daniel Litt, a mathematician at the University of Toronto who independently verified the proof, called it "the first result produced autonomously by an AI that I find interesting in itself."

What the AI Did and Didn't Do

The broader problem remains unsolved. As the Guardian reported, the AI showed Erdős's proposed limit was too low but did not establish a new answer for how fast the pairs actually grow.

OpenAI has not released the full 125-page chain-of-thought reasoning, nor named the specific model. Bubeck described it as an experimental, general-purpose reasoning model rather than one trained specifically for mathematics.

Image: the Guardian - OpenAI makes breakthrough on 80-year-old maths problem

Independent Verification

The result has been validated by outside mathematicians. Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdős Problems website and had previously criticized OpenAI's earlier Erdős claims, co-authored a companion paper. He wrote that the AI achieved its results by "persevering down paths that a human may have dismissed as not worth their time to explore," the Guardian reported.

Bloom added a caveat: "While the original proof produced by AI was completely valid, it was significantly improved by the human researchers at OpenAI and the many other mathematicians involved in the present paper. The human still plays a vital role."

Mathematician Tim Gowers, also writing in the companion paper, described the result as "a milestone in AI mathematics."

OpenAI had been embarrassed last year when it claimed an earlier Erdős breakthrough that turned out to be based on existing literature the model had absorbed. This time, independent verification appears solid.

For the most complete account of the mathematics involved, Nature's coverage by Davide Castelvecchi is the best single read.

Sources: Nature, The Guardian See also https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085-19b0-4534-9c90-465b8e29ad73/unit-distance-remarks.pdf

But it’s worth the drive to go stay at SeaWorld for a few days.

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cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1149726/not-my-theoretical-degree-in-physics

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/9156148

Archived version

Here is the full study: China's mercantilist squeeze on developing countries (pdf)

• The "China Squeeze" affects low- and middle-income countries through three major channels: intense competition in global export markets, rising Chinese import competition in their own domestic markets, and limited access to China’s own consumer market for low-skill-intensive exports from developing countries.
• The scale of the squeeze is historically unprecedented and may represent hundreds of billions of dollars in lost exports and forgone jobs in labor-intensive manufacturing in developing countries.
• Macro indicators on wages, productivity, and exchange rate policy suggest that distortions, especially an undervalued renminbi, may have played a role. Regardless of the cause, China’s dominance may be closing off the traditional manufacturing-led development path for low- and middle-income countries.

...

China’s resurgent trade surplus has revived concern in the United States and Europe, but consequences for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remain underappreciated.

This paper documents a “China Squeeze”: China’s compression of the industrialization space poorer economies need in labor-intensive manufacturing.

Using historical benchmarks and labor-endowment comparisons, we show that China, despite becoming richer and moving up the technology ladder, still commands a historically unusual share of global low-skilled manufacturing export markets. We estimate that this squeeze costs LMICs hundreds of billions of dollars in forgone exports.

It also operates through rising Chinese import competition in LMIC markets and China’s limited absorption of low-skilled imports from poorer countries. Macro evidence suggests that policy distortions, including exchange rate undervaluation, may have amplified the squeeze.

The central concern is developmental: China’s export strength may close off pathways to industrialization for poorer economies.

...

have you heard of this guy? what a schmuck. thanks for reading my political analysis, make sure to lime & subscrime

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Buzz, Woody, Jessie and the rest of the gang’s jobs get exponentially harder when they go head to head with an all-new threat to playtime: tech.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1084244-toy-story-5