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goodmythicaltoday at 2:48 PM0 repliesview on HN

The field has been dealing with this for a long time.

Since at least 2014, which was my first brush with the phenomenon when someone published a 13GB proof [0].

The consensus is that such a proof is potentially illuminating, though further work is likely required. If for instance, conjecture A is true if and only if conjectures B & C are true, and B is proven false through one of these such proofs, then we can see that A is also false given that we accept the disproof of B.

Though, the sense is that further work is likely required because it is easy to see that further work along the same direction, or in directions depending on the proof will be hard or impossible if there are not enough humans or agents that are capable of understanding and utilizing the proof. Making it 'more elegant' will increase it's utility despite not proving anything new.

This is adjacent to all of the work done to create multiple proofs using different techniques. Having the same information (that X is so) in different languages (algebraic, geometric, via harmonic analysis, etc) allows for researchers not familiar with the original technique to participate in further research.

[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/1997488-wikipedia-size-...