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zozbot234yesterday at 6:10 PM1 replyview on HN

OP has reportedly been in contact with Prof. Mantova, who actually worked (jointly with S. L'Innocente) on the key human-authored results behind this AI proof and is arguably in the best position to understand exactly what the AI added that wasn't known before. (See the OP's thread on the Lean Zulip.) So this is happening, and we might see an actual paper publication of this result down the line (possibly encompassing multiple roughly self-contained papers, building up to the final result). The current AI-written version is way too obscure for that, and the AI-written human-targeted "summaries" are not really helpful. Again the OP is quite aware of this.


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xworld21yesterday at 11:38 PM

Vincenzo (Mantova) here: yes, I have been reading bits and pieces of the proof and I can say for sure that the method is sound, at least for the first half (power series with real exponents). I haven't even tried reading the part that mentions the Cantor-Bendixson rank yet, although given how the rest went, I'd be really surprised if there's a problem there.

As with most interesting proofs, the number of core ideas is actually small, I'd say two for the real exponents, and presumably a third idea for lifting up to omnific integers. I have been redoing the real exponents part of the proof going on the ideas only, and with a few smarter choices, I am converging on something very short. And I mean very short, which is amazing. I didn't think the answer would be this close: it 'just' needs looking at the problem from the right angle, and also make a fairly bold guess at the outcome.

Dan's current proof is of course much longer. Between the fossilized ideas that Dan mentions in the post and the formalisation of previous results, there's a lot of cruft that inflates the proof but does not really help understanding what is going on. Luckily the word 'derivation' pops up early, otherwise it would have been very challenging to wade through the lemmas to find the important points.

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