Post by @Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems

2026-10-07 22:21 UTC

I’m not at all a mathematician and mostly bad at understanding things, but, is an unwieldy proof that’s barely comprehensible and might be relying on multiple layers of bugs and traps and whatever undefined edges of formal proof systems even a proof at all? Does it actually merit consideration outside of pure spite (understandable)?

Replies (3)

@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-10-07 22:29

personally I feel like all this shit is a continuation/outgrowth from the crypto “whitepaper” phenomenon: ~zero substantive engagement with the actual discipline in question, and “work product” (quotes intentional) equal to some claims with a “proof” thrown out as its defense (it also continues to be part of a cultural and knowledge DDoS, which others have written better on)

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@Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 2026-10-07 22:35

Like, in other words, I don’t think most mathematicians are particularly interested in building huge datacenters to brute-force compute quintillions of decimals of pi under current algorithms? Because the point is understanding, not mere knowledge? I dunno!

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@aio@awful.systems 2026-10-07 23:16

If it’s actually exploiting a bug in a formal system, no. If it’s a natural-language (unformalized) document which no one can understand, no. On the other hand a formal proof not using bugs which can’t be understood, is still considered a proof, though its value is lower than an understandable proof. The prototypical example before LLMs was the proof of the four-color theorem which relied on computer-checked casework.

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