Mathematicians Build Long-Awaited Graph Sandwich

(quantamagazine.org)

61 points | by ibobev 7 hours ago

6 comments

  • omnicognate 2 hours ago
    Hilarious - a mathematical result that afaict has nothing whatsoever to do with AI, and 75% of the comments are about AI, including this one!
    • bbeonx 1 hour ago
      lol yeah we're doomed
  • mindleyhilner 5 hours ago
    • emil-lp 3 hours ago
      Isn't it actually the bread? The meat is given, if I understand correctly.
    • bananaflag 2 hours ago
      Nice, it's pre-AI
  • bhouston 5 hours ago
    I am not a mathematician but are most papers now accompanied by a lean proof?

    Is there a central repository of lean proofs shared by mathematicians like an npm repository of JavaScript packages?

    Does it all depend on a stupid is-odd package in the end?

    • emil-lp 3 hours ago
      No, almost none (except for in certain fields, such as HoTT) have formalized proofs.
      • bhouston 2 hours ago
        Why not? It seems like this should sort of be the standard now? Or is it hard to make lean proofs in all fields?
        • bbeonx 1 hour ago
          i think there are a few reasons.

          - lean proofs are hard, and a lot of the time there is so much mathematical machinery that folks are working on that you would need to not only prove your result, but also all of the machinery that your subfield it is built on. it would be infeasible for many authors to do all of this work (this might be a major part of multiple careers, and when there are 5 folks in your entire subfield, the payoff is not really worth it)

          - human proofs are readable, and can illustrate concepts better than lean proofs. human proofs give insights into how to think about a type of problem, and this is often the most valuable part of a proof/result.

          - lean proofs are often very difficult to read; while they give you a "verified" check mark, they do not necessarily improve the bounds of human understanding if that makes sense.

    • danabramov 5 hours ago
      It's new but there is actually a registry now: https://palomar-registry.org/
    • UltraSane 4 hours ago
      LLMs have gotten good at creating Lean proofs so the are much more common but not universal. And they depend on https://github.com/leanprover-community/mathlib4
  • Sniffnoy 3 hours ago
    Wondering: if the process for the upper part of the sandwich is the complement of the process for the lower part, why was it so much more difficult? What would go wrong if you took one of the earlier lower-sandwich processes, and complemented it in a similar way? I have to assume it's something, but what?
  • NickNaraghi 5 hours ago
    Seems like this would have strong implications for distillation and/or smaller types of transformers!
    • emil-lp 3 hours ago
      No, this is pure graph theory, and is quite far away from anything machine learning.
    • Scene_Cast2 5 hours ago
      How? I don't see it. (I'm familiar with the ML side, not the combinatorics side.)