On Tue, Dec 9, 2025 at 6:40 AM 'Tomasz Rola' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
*> while my performance was not stellar, would I say that getting score > required any kind of superhuman abilities? Nope.* *I would say that getting a score of 118 on the Putnam is FAR beyond the abilities of 99.99+% of the humans on this planet; so "superhuman" would not be a completely inaccurate word to describe such an ability. * >> >> >> >> >> >> * >> *Grigori Perelman got a gold medal at the International Mathematical >> >> Olympiad in 1982, but he had his 16th birthday only a few days before so >> he >> was not yet a good enough mathematician to make a significant >> contribution >> to mathematics, however he kept getting better and a few >> years later he >> proved one of the Millenium Prize Problems, the Poincare >> "Conjecture", so >> now it is no longer a conjecture, it is a fact. I think >> AIs will follow a >> similar, but steeper, trajectory. * > > > * >The problem is not about trajectory of some automaton going > via existing road (built by humans, mind you) - this is merely solving > a task of optimisation, so it does not boom into trees.The problem is about > automaton choosing to build a wholly new road.* *So would it be correct to say that Grigori Perelman, who happens to be a human being, did not build a wholly new road into the mathematical frontier, all he did was locate the end of a road that was built by others? * > *>This is what I expect from a mathematician.* > *There were hints of calculus before Newton or Leibniz, and before Cantor Jain mathematicians in ancient India had a similar idea about multiple infinite sizes. Can you name any human mathematician who discovered an entirely new field of mathematics completely on his own with no previous mathematician even coming close? I can't. * * John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* xx9 > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv3aEPNt%3DweDCBZjR-0S_ougi%2B2BZrLMti3nr-uZ0gVqDw%40mail.gmail.com.
