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danielrmaytoday at 8:09 AM3 repliesview on HN

I'm enjoying learning about these hard problems, but this line about credit made me chuckle:

> We helped prepare the manuscripts and formalize the proofs in Lean, and we take responsibility for their correctness

Offering to take responsibility for the correctness of a proof written in Lean feels like volunteering to be the fall guy in case someone finds a flaw in basic arithmetic, no?


Replies

DroneBettertoday at 8:23 AM

well, a bug in the Lean kernel was discovered last week by way of an LLM tricking itself and its handler into believing it had found a non-constructive proof of the existence of a nontrivial Collatz cycle, see https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117002106099986943 and https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997917683191056

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traestoday at 8:11 AM

I'm not an expert at it myself, but my understanding is there are numerous ways to "cheat" in a Lean proof (via `sorry` and similar). They're taking responsibility for fully verifying that none of these cheats were used (and that the theorem statements themselves were all correctly formalized.)

emil-lptoday at 8:10 AM

No, the correctness isn't for the "inside the Lean proofs", but for the translation of "human language math" and its formal Lean variant.

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