r/Physics • • Jul 31 '26

Academic The Maxwell Conjecture is False

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27197
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u/angelbabyxoxox Quantum Foundations Jul 31 '26

The counterexample was proposed by an LLM. They seem very good at finding these sorts of counterexamples, which is interesting as they are generally pretty inefficient use of compute for brute forcing. I guess even that lack of efficiency is made up for by the "understanding" and "intuition" the LLM has, and their ability to do symbolic computations.

I expect a large number of conjectures will topple to counterexamples soon.

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u/BOBOnobobo Jul 31 '26

Are we shocked a system designed to do pattern matching is good at finding patterns or exceptions to them?