you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

The codeification of mathematics might make AI-assisted mathematics even better in the future. Proof assistants like Lean or Coq are essentially functional programming languages that allow you to rigorously prove statements via code.

Where a regular AI-generated proof might need a human to verify, an AI-generated proof in Lean would only need a mathematician to verify that the statement to be proved is the correct code-ification of the mathematical problem. This would allow for the "next floor" to be built even quicker, because no human verification is needed anymore. It's just a question of "Does it compile?", because the logic is baked into the programming language itself.

But for this to work, many, many theorems and lemmas need to be formalized in Lean. Many mathematicians and computer scientists already volunteer, but the sheer number of theorems is too much. Maybe generative AI will be able to help with that. Maybe it already does, but I'm not in the loop enough.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Yeah, I think it's going to improve a lot. Though, I actually think the Lean proofs only provide so much benefit.

    The LLMs operate in a lot of ways remarkably similarly to how we do. It's just as important for them to be able to "chunk" ideas into coherent blocks as it is for us. Lean code still allows writing what I would describe as spaghetti-code proofs, and doesn't require building your theory with the sort of coherent building blocks that lets you build high.

    I think the real improvements will come as we learn to use LLMs to write more structured and elegant proofs, and at least for the near term, I think that that favors the human language approach over the Lean-first approach.

    I'm definitely not totally confident of this, and wouldn't be shocked to be wrong though.

  • source
  • parent