| ▲ | vilhelm_s 6 hours ago | |
I don't think it's that subtle: it would be enough to have a continuous integration tool that tries to compile the proofs that are checked into version control and raises an error if it fails. The linked blog post says "Unfortunately, a student once submitted work containing this error; it was almost entirely incorrect and he had no idea." I guess the student probably was aware that not every proof had gone through, and that the that he saw like "99 out of 100 proofs succeeded" and assumed that meant that he had mostly completed the task, not realizing that a false theorem would be used to the give incorrect proofs for the rest of the file. | ||
| ▲ | Dacit 5 hours ago | parent [-] | |
Indeed this can simply be checked by a command-line invocation. But I don't think the student was aware: They would only have seen a purple coloring of the "stuck" part, as shown in the linked example in the blog post. And if one assumes that the system only accepts correct proof steps, it's very easy to miss a small error in a theorem statement... | ||