throwaway2027 6 hours ago

I think I saw Terence Tao use a formal proof language but I don't remember if it was Lean. I'm not familiar with it but I do agree that moving to provable languages could improve AI but isn't the basis just having some immutable rigorous set of tests basically which could be replicated in "regular" programming languages?

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iNic 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can think of theorem provers as really crazy type checkers. It's not just a handful of tests that have to run, but more like a program that has to compile.

	▲	seanhunter 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes exactly. There is this thing called the “Curry-Howard Isomorphism” which (as I understand it) says that propositions in formal logic are isomorphic to types. So the “calculus of constructions” is a typed lambda calculus based on this that makes it possible for you to state some proposition as a type and if you can instantiate that type then what you have done is isomorphic to proving the proposition. Most proof assistants (and certainly Lean) are based on this. So although lean4 is a programming language that people can use to write “normal” programs, when you use it as a proof assistant this is what you are doing - stating propositions and then using a combination of a (very extensive) library of previous results, your own ingenuity using the builtins of the language and (in my experience anyway) a bunch of brute force to instantiate the type thus proving the proposition.

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seanhunter 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was lean4. In fact he has made lean4 versions of all of the proofs in his Analysis I textbook available here

https://github.com/teorth/analysis

He also has blogged about how he uses lean for his research.

Edit to add: Looking at that repo, one thing I like (but others may find infuriating idk) is that where in the text he leaves certain proofs as exercises for the reader, in the repo he turns those into “sorry”s, so you can fork the repo and have a go at proving those things in lean yourself.

If you have some proposition which you need to use as the basis of further work but you haven’t completed a formal proof of yet, in lean, you can just state the proposition with the proof being “sorry”. Lean will then proceed as though that proposition had been proved except that it will give you a warning saying that you have a sorry. For something to be proved in lean you have to have it done without any “sorry”s. https://lean-lang.org/doc/reference/latest/Tactic-Proofs/Tac...

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gaogao 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, though often the easiest way to replicate it in regular programming languages is to translate that language to Lean or another ITM, though auto-active like Verus is used for Rust pretty successfully.

Python and C though have enough nasal demons and undefined behavior that it's a huge pain to verify things about them, since some random other thread can drive by and modify memory in another thread.