Hacker News: ogogmad

New comment by ogogmad in "BB(10) > Graham's Number"

ogogmad — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:24:03 +0000

It's code golf played with Turing machines. The game is: Make the smallest Turing machine whose runtime is bigger than Graham's number, but still terminates. The record right now is 10 states. At least 6 states are needed because any Turing machine with at most 5 states, that finishes running, has a runtime of at most 47,176,870, which is less than Graham's number. In summary:

  BB(10) > G > BB(5) = 47,176,870.

New comment by ogogmad in "A look at the math that OpenAI claims computes faster Fourier transforms"

ogogmad — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:54:37 +0000

Dijkstra's jeremiads were about promoting "formal methods" as the One True Method for software construction. Maybe there's a future for formal methods, but it wasn't ready in the past. No one was arguing about semaphores.

New comment by ogogmad in "A look at the math that OpenAI claims computes faster Fourier transforms"

ogogmad — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:45:24 +0000

Dijkstra was an academic with no skin in the game.

If Dijkstra was so confident that he was right, he should have started a business and put his money where his mouth was. Hell, any True Believer of Dijkstra's could have done the same in the last 60 years. The fact that they haven't - or they've never succeeded enough for me to know of any - speaks volumes about their effectiveness.

New comment by ogogmad in "A look at the math that OpenAI claims computes faster Fourier transforms"

ogogmad — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:44:16 +0000

The constants can be made lower. If we didn't know about the galactic algorithm beforehand, we couldn't begin to do that.

New comment by ogogmad in "“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically"

ogogmad — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:11:22 +0000

A lot of people have been surprised by the interest that AI companies have in solving maths problems without obvious applications, as well as in the financially precarious state of these companies. I imagine that they thought that these companies were helmed by mere bean-counters, like at Boeing. But no, I reckon that they're still academics at heart, and so they work on Navier-Stokes and L=BPL, instead of on how to maximise value for their (soon to be) shareholders.

New comment by ogogmad in "“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically"

ogogmad — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:03:27 +0000

  Don't hire a straight-A student, unless it's to take exams; or a professor, unless it's to write papers.
 -- Nassim Taleb

How interesting that Anthropic and OpenAI are full of professors and straight-A students!

New comment by ogogmad in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

ogogmad — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 11:20:06 +0000

Who decreed that they are entitled to get paid for that?

Maybe this hurts more than it should do because of publish-or-perish.

New comment by ogogmad in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

ogogmad — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:14:04 +0000

>> virtually none of this stuff is possible with technology any normal citizen has access to.

Initially, yes. Long term, however? Perhaps still yes.

> 5) professors are left to rewrite the AI Lean slop into real human-readable math?

6) AI writes the proof into something easier to follow than a PDF document.

Hmm. Oh shit.

New comment by ogogmad in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

ogogmad — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 09:34:02 +0000

> The risk here is that this does do fundamental long-term damage to mathematics as a viable field.

All the commotion evens out: It's much easier to learn maths than ever before; you don't need to go to lectures any more; you don't need to learn from a specialist (advisor, lecturer) any more; it all costs much less than it used to.

So mathematics will continue to advance, albeit differently from before. The social structures will not survive however.

New comment by ogogmad in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

ogogmad — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 09:30:07 +0000

Is this not greed?

From APIs to Languages: Generalising Method Names [using regular expressions]

ogogmad — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 10:44:25 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/11/09/from-apis-to-languages-generalising-method-names/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49865477

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ogogmad in "We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians"

ogogmad — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 18:05:53 +0000

Yes today but maybe no tomorrow.

New comment by ogogmad in "We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians"

ogogmad — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 18:03:08 +0000

What if merging with them doesn't make them better at anything, but worse? Would that be a concern?

New comment by ogogmad in "We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians"

ogogmad — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:57:58 +0000

You're a Nazi piece of shit. [edit: removed identifying information]

New comment by ogogmad in "We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians"

ogogmad — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:57:30 +0000

Supposedly autistic, therefore loser? You're hideous. You fuck off.

New comment by ogogmad in "Zeta(5) has been proven irrational (also Lean-verified)"

ogogmad — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 11:59:11 +0000

This reaches 1/3 milestones deemed a "breakthrough" by Epoch AI: https://epoch.ai/frontiermath/open-problems/apery-irrational...

The remaining two "breakthrough" milestones are (i) a proof or refutation of the Poincaré conjecture in 4 dimensions (ii) an improvement to the best-known classical prime factorisation algorithms.

Zeta(5) has been proven irrational (also Lean-verified)

ogogmad — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 11:54:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/comments/1woe4gx/a_lean_formalization_of_zeta5_being_irrational/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49855681

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by ogogmad in "If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it"

ogogmad — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 11:00:19 +0000

> AIs are outright terrible explainers

Gemini's explanations are very good.

New comment by ogogmad in "I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture"

ogogmad — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:34:19 +0000

The problem with what you're saying is that any old random true proposition about the integers is not necessarily interesting enough to be called a theorem. GIT (or the uncomputability of the Busy Beaver problem) does not establish a limitation on proving theorems, but rather on determining whether a proposition is true or not. Most propositions are ugly and irrelevant. So GIT/Busy Beaver is irrelevant.

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Oh, and: All proofs are conditional on axioms. If those axioms are computably enumerable, then all of their consequences are computably enumerable too.

New comment by ogogmad in "Astra for Law"

ogogmad — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:20:47 +0000

Consider if you will the thing called "time", which things happen in.