• Secret Sauce of Dana Scott and Raymond Smullyan

    From Mild Shock@janburse@fastmail.fm to comp.lang.prolog on Sat Jan 18 01:15:36 2025
    From Newsgroup: comp.lang.prolog

    Hi,

    How it started:

    Computers Still Can't Do Beautiful Mathematics - by Gina Kolata ----------------------------------------------------------------- Mathematicians often say that their craft is as much an art
    as a science. But as more and more researchers are using
    computers to prove their theorems, some worry that the magic
    is in danger of fading away.

    How its going:

    Computers Do Produce Beautiful Mathematics - Dr. Larry Wos -----------------------------------------------------------------
    In addition to exhibiting logical reasoning of the type
    found in mathematics, reasoning programs produce results
    that are startling and elegant. Dr. J. Lukasiewicz was well
    recognized for his contributions to areas of logic,

    and yet the program OTTER recently found a proof far shorter and
    more elegant than that produced by this eminent researcher,
    and the program used the same notation and style of
    reasoning. Mathematicians and logicians find elegance in
    shorter proofs.

    In August of 1990, Dr. Dana Scott of Carnegie Mellon
    University attended a workshop at Argonne National
    Laboratory. There he learned of OTTER and some of its uses
    and successes. Upon returning to his university, Dr.
    Scott's curiosity prompted him to suggest (via electronic
    mail) 68 theorems for consideration by the computer.

    His curiosity was almost immediately satisfied, for the sought-
    after 68 proofs were returned with the comment that all were
    obtained in a single computer run with the program--and in
    less than 16 CPU minutes on a Sun 4 workstation. Dr. Scott
    now uses his own copy of OTTER on his Macintosh.

    Dr. R. Smullyan of the University of Indiana showed
    great pleasure and surprise at learning of some of the
    successes achieved by an automated reasoning program. As
    evidence of his interest, he posed a number of questions,
    receiving in turn the answers to all but one of them--a
    question that is still open. https://theory.stanford.edu/~uribe/mail/qed.messages/91.html

    Bye
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