How an AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy | Science | AAAS
Nearly 200 years ago, Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes sought to describe the chaotic motion of fluids mathematically, writing down equations that are still routinely used by everyone from aircraft designers to climatologists. But the formulas they developed weren’t guaranteed to describe all possible conditions. Mathematicians have spent decades trying to either prove the equations can do that or, alternatively, that there are situations in which the equations break down and give a nonsensical result. Today, however, OpenAI claimed it had solved the Navier-Stokes problem. Thanks to an 88-hour assault by some 10,000 artificial intelligence agents—AI systems that can act autonomously—the company found a case in which the equations falter. One researcher estimates that represents one of the largest amounts of computing power ever thrown at a single scientific problem. Navier-Stokes is one of six Millennium Problems on a list compiled by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000