Re:Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson
by dragonwriter on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @03:54PM
(#18810096)
> How do you skip a step in a proof?
Well, from the math profs I've seen, the usual method is to interpose “it is intuitively obvious” in place of the skipped step(s).
The tricky part is having a correct intuition as to what you should be skipping to, sure, but that's the same problem as you have doing a proof (minus actually figuring out the justification) since humans don't generally do proofs by exhaustively listing every possible next step from what is already proven in a BFS until getting the desired result and then pruning all the other paths.
Well, from the math profs I've seen, the usual method is to interpose “it is intuitively obvious” in place of the skipped step(s).
The tricky part is having a correct intuition as to what you should be skipping to, sure, but that's the same problem as you have doing a proof (minus actually figuring out the justification) since humans don't generally do proofs by exhaustively listing every possible next step from what is already proven in a BFS until getting the desired result and then pruning all the other paths.