The Longest Math Proof Ever, in Minecraft Survival Mode

· The Quantastic Journal ·

1 min read Original article ↗

Humans listed the atoms of symmetry; Axiom says its AI agents have now formalized the list with zero cheats

Carmine De Stefano

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Image by the author, in the style of Minecraft. Not affiliated with Mojang

On October 26, a company called Axiom announced that its AI agents had translated the longest proof ever written by humans into Lean, a language a computer can check line by line, and that the result has no gaps. The claim is Axiom’s own: its repository labels the review “self-assessed”, and Axiom is the only reviewer it lists.

The proof runs for about 15,000 pages, spread over more than 500 articles, written by roughly 100 people across decades. I am not a mathematician, and I could not get through page 12.

So I did what I do with every problem too big for my head. I looked for blocks. I suspect it is the only way in, and I suspect it is what the mathematicians did too. Nobody holds 15,000 pages in their head, so you cut the problem into pieces small enough to hold, and you stack them.