Reshetnikov didn't confess to them being reverse engineered, though. He confessed to them being conjecture arrived at after working on the problem for a bit by tweaking similar integrals in symbolic math software / numerical approximations. Every post was a gamble because it could have been wrong.

Of course, that could be a lie, but he came clean about other things that make sense retrospectively.

▲

tibbar 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Every post was a gamble because it could have been wrong

Symbolic differentiation is a deterministic algorithm. There is no reason for his posts to be a gamble. I'm sure there was a lots of interesting trial and error in developing good question and answer pairs, but once he posted the question he knew what the answer was already.

	▲	creatonez a minute ago \| parent [-]
		He was specifically targeting problems that symbolic math software had given up on. He was only using symbolic software to solve the similarly shaped problems first, which allowed him to be fairly confident in his conjecture.