> Working with constraints is an excellent way to develop your creative chops
Exactly. As someone who DJs (I know - the most low-skill hobby in existence), beatmatching by ear rather than using computer displays is helpful because it teaches you to listen to the music you're playing and how your mix sounds (the main output of DJing) rather than doing something because a screen says it's optimal.
what suggests that we will hit an asymptote any time soon? Agree with you on the second part. The ever elusive frontier will probably always be changing hands after some point.
"Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?"
Use AI to deepen my understanding and learning some interesting math. I studied a lot of combinatorics in high school, but my understand at that time was very adhoc (that most of combinatorics problems are just a bunch of elementary tricks applying here and there). With AI, I could categorize the bag of tricks into systematic topics, and discover formal concepts.
For example, here are two topics that came up during my time solving combinatorics problems in the past:
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