AI helps examine Gödel notebooks

AI helped a researcher make sense of 16 notebooks by Kurt Gödel, containing 1,009 pages of dense mathematical writing, much of it in an obsolete German shorthand. The work had been moving at about a page a week. The researcher, Jan von Plato, gave Claude his transcriptions and related material. The AI produced a 650-page explanation in a couple of days, which he then checked page by page. The Guardian’s report says the notebooks appear to contain hundreds of theorems that had not been known.

The important detail is that the AI’s output wasn’t treated as proof on its own. Von Plato ran a reconstructed proof through Coq, a program that checks mathematical proofs, and it passed. Of 663 theorems Claude identified, about 400 were verified as stated, about 200 needed repairs, and about 50 were false. A logic professor quoted in the report hadn’t seen the reconstructed proof, so its significance still needs expert scrutiny.

For a business, the practical point is narrower than “AI makes discoveries.” AI can help a person connect information spread across a large body of material, but the output still needs checking, and some of it may be wrong or incomplete. That combination of AI-assisted analysis and human verification is the kind of thing we build into an AI command centre.