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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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I think that critique was reasonable even a month ago: most of the novel proofs discovered by LLMs could have been done by a modal grad student in the field, given time and motivation. Still useful, but picking off only mildly interesting results that haven't received much focus isn't world changing.

This particular (dis)proof, however, is quite different. It has received extensive attention. Research Problems in Discrete Geometry called it "possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry." Surveys have been written on it. Erdos himself returned to it many times and tried your approach, offering a bounty for solutions.

If some billionaire had dedicated billions of dollars for a resolution of the conjecture, it seems quite possible that nothing would have come of it. Thomas Bloom in the companion remarks has some interesting speculations as to why it resisted human attempts for so long that are relevant, and the other remarks are interesting as well.

Still useful, but picking off only mildly interesting results that haven't received much focus isn't world changing.

It is. Quantity has quality of its own. Even if LLM peak below humans, a stupider brain that is inexhaustible, can work 24/7 and can be scaled to infinity means that a lot of intellectual things could be bruteforced in the million monkeys with million typewriters way. Throw at a million small problems and there will be breakthrough somewhere.