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Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by Tainnor on Monday March 18, 2024 @10:54AM (#39745420)
It's almost always easier to understand theorems than proofs. People could be writing down properties of their programs and the AI could generate a proof or produce a counterexample. It is not necessary to understand the proof in order to know that it is correct.

At least in principle. Practically, any system as least as powerful as first-order logic is undecidable, so there can never be any computer program that would be able to do this perfectly. It might be that some day, an AI could be just as good as a trained mathematician, but so far, it doesn't look like it.

Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by agentultra on Monday March 18, 2024 @11:23AM (#39745804)
> It might be that some day, an AI could be just as good as a trained mathematician, but so far, it doesn't look like it.

One of the on-going arguments in automated theorem proving has been this central question: would anyone understand or want to read a proof written by a machine?

A big part of why we write them and enjoy them is elegance, a rather subjective quality appreciated by people.

In computer science we don't tend to care so much for this quality; if the checker says the proof is good that's generally about as far as we take it.

But endearing proofs that last? That people want to read? That's much harder to do.

Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by adrianN on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @12:10AM (#39752875)
I don't think anyone wants elegant proofs for their software's correctness. As long as the code is proven correct, programmers would be satisfied.
Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by agentultra on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @08:27AM (#39755020)
I had mentioned that. This is true today when software developers are writing proofs and why automation is useful.

You would still need to be able to read the proof that a computer generated and understand what it contains in order to judge whether it is correct with respect to your specifications. So in some sense elegance would be useful since the proof isn’t written by a human but has to be understood by one.

If the input here is still plain language prompts… then we’ll have to assume that we eventually develop artificial cognition. As far as I know, there isn’t a serious academic attempting this, only VC’s with shovels to sell.

Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by bgandrew on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @10:01AM (#39755809)
Meanwhile, the shovels learned to solve mathematical problems of the international math olympiad.

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphageometry-an-olymp...

Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by agentultra on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @07:18PM (#39761326)
Deep learning also learned how to play Go, not terribly interesting.