Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is Aristotle - https://aristotle.harmonic.fun/ It's an LLM.
"Aristotle integrates three main components: a Lean proof search system, an informal reasoning system that generates and formalizes lemmas, and a dedicated geometry solver" It is far more than an LLM, and math != "language".
“Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
221–230 of 385 posts
Re: “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the question is, how can humans have verification that the problem statement was correctly encoded into that Lean specification?
The problem statement is apparently > Let C>0 and ϵ>0 be sufficiently small. Are there infinitely many integers a,b,n with a≥ϵn and b≥ϵn such that a!b!∣n!(a+b−n)! and a+b>n+Clogn? Which seems like it's the type of thing you give as a homework problem to state formally in an intro class.
Re: “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
#223Re: “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you verify that the AI translation to Lean is a correct formalization of the problem? In other fields, generative AI is very good at making up plausible sounding lies, so I'm wondering how likely that is for this usage.
For this reason, when we announce results on e.g. the IMO, we formalize the statements by hand and inspect the proofs carefully to ensure they capture the full spirit of the problem. However, there are some good heuristics. If you expect a problem to be hard and the proof is very short, you've probably missed something!
Re: “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
#225I work at Harmonic, the company behind Aristotle. To clear up a few misconceptions: - Aristotle uses modern AI techniques heavily, including language modeling. - Aristotle can be guided by an informal (English) proof. If the proof is correct, Aristotle has a good chance at translating it into Lean (which is a strong vote of confidence that your English proof is solid). I believe that's what happened here. - Once a pr…
What occurs when this process is reversed - translate from lean to informal english, and does iterating this then help research better approaches toward writing proofs in human language?
It's another reformulation rather than a true proof. Now, instead of wanting a proof of a theorem, now we just need to prove that this proof is actually proving the theorem. The proof itself being so incomprehensible that it can't on its own be trusted, but if it can be shown that it can be trusted then the theorem must be true.
Re: “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you verify that the AI translation to Lean is a correct formalization of the problem? In other fields, generative AI is very good at making up plausible sounding lies, so I'm wondering how likely that is for this usage.
That's what's covered by the "assuming you have formalized the statement correctly" parenthetical. Given a formal statement of what you want, Lean can validate that the steps in a (tedious) machine-readable purported proof are valid and imply the result from accepted axioms. This is not AI, but a tiny, well reviewed kernel that only accepts correct formal logic arguments. So, if you have a formal statement that you'v…
A little bit nitpicking, but according to books like AIMA that is indeed AI. In the first chapter even any control system is classified as AI.
Because of the reasons stated in the 1st chapter, I totally agree with the authors.
The whole system is AI. That part is a verifier in a chain of “suggestions/instict -> verifier” like used in neurosymbolic systems for automated driving, for example.
Re: “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem statement is apparently > Let C>0 and ϵ>0 be sufficiently small. Are there infinitely many integers a,b,n with a≥ϵn and b≥ϵn such that a!b!∣n!(a+b−n)! and a+b>n+Clogn? Which seems like it's the type of thing you give as a homework problem to state formally in an intro class.
Are you an expert? Not gatekeeping here but I have no intuition for what is easy or hard to formalise. A lot of very simply stated graph theoretical results are apparently extremely hard to formalise.
Re: “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Formal verification of program correctness is also (for obvious reasons) key to unlocking AI-driven synthesis (i.e. 'vibe' coding) of "correct" programs that will verifiably meet the given spec.
Not all aspects of a spec can be formally encoded. But even half-way houses are good. Eg you can give the vague spec 'build me a todo list app', but you can still formally prove that everything your app does finishes, or even that it finishes in reasonable time.
Re: “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any talk of "AGI" is, as always, ridiculous. How did you arrive at "ridiculous"? What we're seeing here is incredible progress over what we had a year ago. Even ARC-AGI-2 is now at over 50%. Given that this sort of process is also being applied to AI development itself, it's really not clear to me that humans would be a valuable component in knowledge work for much longer.
You either have a case of human augmented AI here or AI augmented human. Either by themself would not have made the step.
Re: “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what's covered by the "assuming you have formalized the statement correctly" parenthetical. Given a formal statement of what you want, Lean can validate that the steps in a (tedious) machine-readable purported proof are valid and imply the result from accepted axioms. This is not AI, but a tiny, well reviewed kernel that only accepts correct formal logic arguments. So, if you have a formal statement that you'v…
I think the question is, how can humans have verification that the problem statement was correctly encoded into that Lean specification?