The Twin Prime Conjecture and the 'Mental Shift'

In recent months, the role of artificial intelligence in solving fundamental mathematical problems has become a subject of intense debate. This Habr article examines progress on the twin prime conjecture, where AI improved the record for the bounded gap between primes to 186. Despite this technical achievement, experts and the academic community emphasize that quantitative improvements are not equivalent to deep conceptual understanding. The text cites the position of Google and 25 Fields Medalists, who insist on the need for a 'mental shift' and new mathematical structures to solve such problems. While AI demonstrates impressive computational power, achieving the final result—proving the conjecture—requires fundamentally new ideas, which are reportedly already emerging outside the scope of machine learning. The article warns against substituting the creative pursuit of mathematicians with simple algorithmic brute-forcing.