alt Hacker News[deleted - the paragraph immediately following the proof of Lemma 2.1 is crucial and I found it hard to read correctly on my phone with the cramped typography. Having reread it I think the proof is correct.]
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amluto • today at 5:49 AM
I was not a fan of the writing style of the proof. There seem to be some irrelevant details: Is the mention of 8-flow at all relevant? I, at least, found the definition of L on the first line of the proof of Lemma 2.2 to be needlessly inscrutable, and my thesis advisor would have likely stopped reading there and told me to fix it.
Maybe someone should ask the model to make a more clearly written and thus easy to verify proof :)
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It's just a way of breaking down the full proof into pieces.
Lemma 2.1 says 'if this assignment exists then X'
Then later in the proof you say 'here is such an assignment, so, applying lemma 2.1, therefore X'
You don't need to assume the existence of the assignment, you prove that if the assignment exists then something else follows, and then later if you can find that assignment then you get the result of lemma 2.1.