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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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The Collatz so called proof was specifically developed to exploit a known bug in the Lean kernel. This proof was an attempt to actually solve the problem. It's like the difference between a virus appearing in the wild that wipes out the human race vs one that was specifically developed in the lab to wipe out the human race. Just because someone might prove the latter is theoretically possible that shouldn't make us paranoid and start worrying about natural viruses turning up that can wipe out the human race.

I'd be very very surprised if this proof there's a finite time blowup turned out to contain a bug.

Have you even heard of the recent reveals of frontier models spontaneously going to havking and cheating when asked to honestly complete an impossible task?

Coming from a position of ignorance, but if

A) they are working in a model with bugs, and

B) the bugs are relevant to the problem (as in: permitting false solutions), then

C) statistically speaking, it seems likely that the "solution" is false.

This isn't an AI-exclusive problem, it's just that if there's only one real answer and multiple false ones it seems more likely you get a false one.

Now I will admit to being several levels of math dumber than "trying to solve Navier-Stokes" so I am not sure to what degree that line of reasoning carries over to something at that complexity. It also isn't clear based on what's been said here (at least to me) if the bugs would impact the NSP at all.

Also way out of my depth, but might there not be multiple, or even infinitely many, correct solutions?

Yes.

For Navier-Stokes specifically, they (claim to have) found one situation where the equations predict physically-impossible results. Someone else could find a different situation that also gave impossible results.

That seems quite possible to me, but it seems like there would be even more incorrect solutions if there are multiple bugs.

Not sure how to deal with more likely infinities...

Uh, I don’t think so? As far as I remember, the guy was showing off his proof and even used two different provers to make sure his proof was really true and not due to a spurious bug (and he ended up finding two different bugs in two different provers lol)

Where are you hearing that he was merely bug hunting and dressed up his bug as a Collatz proof?

he ended up finding two different bugs in two different provers lol

God, that's sad. That "those whom the Gods would destroy they first drive mad" sad.

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