Claude decodes Gödel's shorthand notebooks, uncovering hundreds of hidden proofs
AI unlocks Gödel's notebooks, said to contain hundreds of proved theorems
Kurt Gödel's 1,009 pages of 1940s workbooks, written in an obsolete German shorthand, had been yielding about a page a week to a Helsinki research team. Then Claude digested the whole archive in days, surfacing 663 theorems — roughly 400 verified in the Coq proof assistant — including a near-complete proof that Gödel had claimed but could never reconstruct.
Humans read one page at a time and we tend to forget things. It takes us a year to read about 50 pages. We just are not able to keep in mind all the different parts. The AI can connect all the pieces in a thousand pages.
- iltennico
From what historians of science tell us, Gödel was in any case an absolute perfectionist who mostly published work that was bulletproof. His enormous body of notes surely contained some very sharp insights, but it is unlikely that he would have produced illuminating, conclusive new theorems by chance and without realizing it. He was a very harsh reviewer of his own work.
- hobo123
The stuff about Gabelsberger shorthand sounds ludicrous to me. My father would write notes in a custom version of it until his death 2020.
Officially (i.e. in schools teaching stenography, back in the day) it was long ago replaced by "unified German shorthand" (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift IIRC), but he always considered Gabelsberger to be superior.
Well, maybe he too was one of the 6 people in the world who could read it (or yes, maybe that was hyperbole, I'm not sure) :D
- agnosticmantis
AI did not comment on the consistency or completeness of the notebooks.
- imbiased
I can't remember the exact quote but I believe I read that Gödel confided to Einstein (in their walks in Princeton) on his deep worry of his work being forgotten. If only he knew.
- ducttapecrown
It'd be interesting to hear about these new 14 themes of logic Gödel pursued!