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Article says that there are 2 formulations of the NS problem and both are interesting: one is about fluid behaviour with no external forces, other is about fluid behaviour with external forces.
For a counter-example the latter is easier since you can have a tricky external forcefield.
I learned from this charming lo-fi video that it is actually much easier to find singularities in the Navier-Stokes equation for compressible fluids (which is out of scope for the Millenium Prize problem). The first was found in 1998 by Zhouping Xin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wEn9B7pDV4
Right - OpenAI proved the forced blow-up case rather than the harder unforced one, with the Millenium Prize problem statement saying it would be awarded for either one.
The forced version is easier since you can custom design the force function to get the result (it doesn't have to be a realistic force like stirring), so getting the blow-up might be regarded just as much a function of your bespoke force function as of the fluid dynamics itself, which is apparently what OpenAI did, pushing the definition of the force function being "smooth" to it's limit.
So, it appears OpenAI did legitimately meet the Millenium Prize solution criteria, but in the most unrealistic, and therefore least interesting, way possible.
My friend, who is a mathematician, sent this in our group chat:
The title is a bit misleading. The variant with a smooth forcing was one of the four valid variants in the Clay formulation. It is interesting to solve it. It is still an interesting and impressive result. The no force version is also interesting and remains unsolved. It isn’t reasonable to just dismiss the proof on the grounds that 26 years later we claim it was never that interesting. This is the first time I’ve seen this attitude.
So what they are saying is that humans, in this case Charles Fefferman (a math prodigy, going by his history), failed to specify the problem correctly?
No, that‘s not the issue. If you look at https://www.claymath.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/navierst..., second page, you will see an option C is one of the four that is asked to be solved. And that option is the one that allows for an external force, which is what OpenAI solved. There is no question that OpenAI solved what the Clay institute is looking for. But that specific option C isn’t what the larger math community cares about, it’s a pretty niche case
I think GP's point is that if the larger math community doesn't care about option C, Fefferman shouldn't have given that option in the first place.
yes!
Fefferman and the larger math community are not the same actor; a divergence between their concerns is not surprising.
But Clay chose Fefferman to represent "the larger math community"? I'm calling out Clay/Fefferman here, not the community. Though the community also had over 25 years to contest the problem statement, and had no problem with it until now.
Surprisingly enough, being chosen by another actor as proxy for some group doesn’t actually resolve the problem that an individual may not always be an accurate proxy for the concerns of the group (and especially for the same descriptive aggregate group a generation after the proxy acts on their behalf.)
I'm pretty sure Fefferman's formulation of the problem got a lot of vetting before the Clay Institute accepted it. As such, it probably does reflect the math community's understanding of the problem. The "problem" such as it is, is that it might be the least interesting case especially given the solution that was obtained.
A solution to any of the four options made by an LLM armed with a theorem solver and millions of dollars of compute would still not be that interesting to the math community since it is not likely that any new insights oe questions can be derived from the result
I think you are agreeing with me? My point is that "the larger math community" failed to set the bounds of the problem correctly.
Yes. And more humans—in this case OpenAI researchers—similarly failed in choosing how to direct the AI tools.
And yet another set of humans—Open AI marketers—made an error in how they sold the result of the preceding errors.
But its not news that computers are mere tools and that any error blamed on a computer involves at least two human errors, one of which is blaming the computer instead of the human(s) responsible.
Its perhaps a bit less obvious that every thing for which credit is given to a computer involves at least one human error—that of crediting the computer—and certainly can be more amusing when it involves a bunch of human errors.
Fefferman was right to include option C as someone could have come up with less contrived counterexample accompanied by some interesting theorems that actually shed light on the general case
Doesn't the way OAI's proof is formulated essentially rule that out, in that as long as an alternative solution concerns option C, it'd have to live in this same solution space they carved out?
Betteridge's law of headlines
That would be wrong here…
Classic example of moving the goal posts. “Exploiting a loophole” is how you solve many great problems in math.
That’s not at all the topic of discussion. The article is talking about the fact that OpenAI solved a version of the problem that is niche and isn’t the one the math community cares about
Then why was it allowed as an option in the millennium prize statement?
At the time that the Millenium Prize problems were formulated, the force term was understood to make the problem more realistic, since real fluids are always going to have external forces applied to them. A blowup that happens under constant gravity, for example, would probably be no less interesting than an entirely unforced blowup. The strategy of constructing impossibly complex external forces to induce a blowup was pioneered by Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa only over the past few years.
Who is this math community? Since when did they form the consensus that this option is not at all what they care about, before or after they knew about OpenAI’s solution?
What about Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge, did they also attempt to solve the same challenge? Didn’t they know it wasn’t interesting?
No, OpenAI did not solve the "wrong" Navier-Stokes problem. OpenAI did not solve the hardest version of the problem (unforced blow-up), but did give a solution to the Clay Millennium Prize Problem as written and understood, choosing the explicitly allowed forced option.
SciAm writes "in a sense, the LLM found and exploited a loophole in the framing of the question". This is pure sensationalism. Choosing option (C) (out of an explicit list of four options) is neither a "loophole" nor something "found by the LLM"; everyone involved knew this was the option they were pursuing.
With the grumbling out the way, there is some actual scientific content to the article: there's a strong argument that OpenAI's method will not extend to the unforced case, leaving our understanding of NS incomplete. This negative result is itself new and interesting (and predicated entirely on the solution found by OpenAI)!
Totally agree. I wouldn't quite call it clickbait, but the article does this thing I find annoying where it puts the "sensationalist" framing at the beginning (the "loophole" quote you put), but then closer to the end fully admits that it wasn't really a loophole in any case:
As I understand it the "loophole", if you want to call it that, is that OpenAI's custom-designed forcing function was smooth, as the rules said it had to be, but was non-analytic, consisting of some construction of "compactly supported bump functions", meaning a mass of tiny little pushes at precise points of space and time to push a vortex into blowing up the math.
Reminds me of Maxwell's Demon.
God, it’s embarrassing to read stuff like this. They’re making it seem as if everyone involved was either stupid or dishonest just so they can pretend they have a scoop here.
There's a big market in journalism to take down the popular thing in the news. "Everyone is wrong" and here is my article where I wildly exaggerates some minor details to justify the headline which made you click on the article.
Or a better framing: Clay Institute chose the wrong Navier-Stokes problem for a Millennium Prize.
treating LLM's under a separate apartness ruleset isn't going to go well
I will admit that when I heard they only had forced blowup I went back to sleep (but I've never been more that cursorily interested in analysis).
I dunno this sounds like some insane goalpost moving
https://archive.is/52HlJ
This situation illustrates exactly the limitation of AI and why we still need humans in the loop.
It reminds me of a junior coding bootcamp lecture I once gave many years ago before AI coding. One of the first slides said "Computers will do exactly what you say, not what you mean."
Seems to me this illustrates more the limitation of humans, they are the ones which chose the wrong problem, not the one mathematicians cared about.
When the news spread about the solution of this problem by AI we started wondering what will happen when AI will start generating proofs we can’t comprehend.
Today, we are discussing if AI cheated by picking the easy problem to solve which means that we at least still comprehend what’s going on.
I wish mathematics and the rest of the human intellect wouldn’t turn into content marketing that is generated primarily to trigger strong human emotions.
I feel that this is going to hurt both AI and the disciplines that can benefit the most from it