Snake-in-the-Box was probably the best math problem I'll ever find. I encountered it at a moment when there was still progress to be made that was within my reach. I had great fun working on it.

I was feeling urgency to get more results before anyone brought AI to bear on the problem. I didn't know when that day would come but I figured it was inevitable.

Last month, a team of 10 people published Snake-in-the-Box results significantly exceeding what I had been able to achieve. They didn't (yet) say how they did it but it's likely AI played a big role. I probably can't compete anymore.

I'm not alone in this regard. AI is making inroads in various areas of mathematics. People way more skilled than I are being outdone by AI.

It's time for me to turn my attention to something else, which won't feel the same. I've come to have a certain affection for the Snake-in-the-Box problem.

It's like I'm a teenage boy who's had his heart broken, my mom is telling me there are other fish in the sea, and I want to roll my eyes and say, "Mom, girls are not fungible."

I was moved today when I read that Weird Al Yankovic turned down a seven‑figure offer to perform in Saudi Arabia, more than he had ever been offered in his life to do a show.

Nineteen years ago I quoted Robert Fripp:

I have just turned down a likely $150,000 licence on a KC track. This was for use by a tobacco company, to encourage young people to smoke. Beer & cigarettes pay some of the highest fees in sponsorship, advertising, licensing.

I just fixed the link in that 2007 blog posting to go to an archived page, where Fripp also says

I am still angered when stepping into a lift (or, as I might type while in the US, an elevator) & hear Beatles songs.

Perhaps Fripp had in mind how crummy a deal The Beatles had gotten on their publishing rights, something I learned earlier today from a BBC podcast.

Steve Vai said:

When I was 19 years old, I asked Frank Zappa for some advice on being an independent musician. I expected some lofty answer, but Frank was very practical and he said to me "keep your publishing".

Headline writing by trial and error.
Screenshots from earlier today and later on:

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

— Béla Bartók

You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book.

— Paul Erdős

Dimension 4 is the most difficult dimension. It is too old to spank, the way we might deal with the little dimensions 1, 2, and 3; but it is also too young to reason with, the way we deal with grown‑up dimensions 5 and higher.

— R. H. Bing

About the Snake-in-the-Box problem, an oracle told me

Once the search is in progress, something will be found

Three days later I got email from two people at a university in China who had found new records for Snake-in-the-Box in 13 dimensions and Coil-in-the-Box (a related problem) in 11, 12, and 13 dimensions. I posted their results to my leaderboard page.

The email from China was my first contact with anyone currently working on the problem. It felt good to know that people are still interested enough in Snake-in-the-Box to find new results and it felt good that they had found my web page.

And yes the timing is cute: the email coming on the heels of an oracle's terse response (that didn't say who would find something).