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Re:Two-hundred-terabyte math proof is largest ever by ifdefdebug on Friday May 27, 2016 @10:07AM (#11786114)
> But if there is no proof, you will never know, because it always could be the next proof you haven't looked at.

But that's exactly what I meant. So the brute force program proposed in the post I replied to doesn't exist, right?

Let's say, you have proposition A. You write a program to brute force proofs for A. If it finds a proof, it will halt and output Yes, if it finds a disproof it will halt and output No, otherwise it will check the next proof.

So if you say that your brute force program can proof/disproof proposition A (and A1, A2, A3, ... for that matter), you will have to proof that your program will halt for sure after a finite number of steps. Now that's proposition B.

If you find a clever proof for proposition B, then you can claim that you wrote a program that can proof or disproof proposition A - maybe in a zillion years, but it can.

If you can't find such a proof for proposition B, you can always try to write a brute force program to proof/disproof proposition B... then C, D, E, etc. :)

And here comes the halting problem: you may be able to proof that a specific program will halt on a specific input, but it can be very hard to proof. But you can't proof that a specific program will halt on every input. This is directly related to Godel's incompleteness of formal systems.

Re:Two-hundred-terabyte math proof is largest ever by Certhas on Friday May 27, 2016 @11:39AM (#11786701)
Every conjecture that is provable can be proved by the proposed program of length (conjecture + constant) in finite time.

That was the original statement:

> you can encode any proof to a few hundred lines.

This type of encoding is funny of course. You can not determine from the encoding of the proof whether the encoding is the encoding of a proof (as you point out). But if you have a proof, and thus know that a proof exists you can "encode" it very succinctly in this program for whatever that is worth.

Re:Two-hundred-terabyte math proof is largest ever by ifdefdebug on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:21PM (#11787014)
> you can encode any proof to a few hundred lines.

Yeah, I misread that. The sentence implies the existence of a proof. So I was clearly talking about something different. Thanks.