A SAT Attack on the Erdos Discrepancy Conjecture · HackerPapers discussions

A SAT Attack on the Erdos Discrepancy Conjecture — mentioned by scott_s

Wed, 19 Feb 2014 21:22:55 GMT

If the certificate from the SAT solver does not count as a proof, you can't blame the popular accounts. That's the language the paper authors use: The negative witness, that is, the DRUP unsatisﬁability certiﬁcate, is probably one of longest proofs of a non-trivial mathematical result ever produced. Its gigantic size is comparable, for example, with the size of the whole Wikipedia, so one may have doubts about to which degree this can be accepted as a proof of a mathematical statement. From http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.2184v2.pdf

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

A SAT Attack on the Erdos Discrepancy Conjecture — mentioned by ColinWright

Wed, 19 Feb 2014 20:58:52 GMT

Knowing the FCT as well as I do, I have to say that I and many of my colleagues do not consider the H-A proof to be anything like automated reasoning. The work that Gowers and associates are now doing is very much so, but programming a computer to conduct a specific search, and for every item found compute whether it has a specific characteristic is really just like getting a machine to carry out a factoring algorithm. We run the risk of arguing past each other, and potentially being in "violent agreement," but consider this. If you take an 8x8 chessboard and remove any black square and any…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.