I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture(overreacted.io)
259 points by m-hodges 25 days ago | 290 comments
tl;dr: An author with no math background spent a month and roughly $40k worth of tokens orchestrating multiple Claude and ChatGPT agents to produce a Lean-formalized proof of Conway's 50-year-old refinement conjecture on omnific integers. The workflow relied on separate "PM," math, red-team, and Lean agents, with frequent restarts, adversarial audits, and grounding via Lean formalization to prevent LLM hallucination and jargon drift. The proof passed mechanical checks but hasn't been independently verified by mathematicians yet.
HN Discussion:
  • ↑Analogizes the approach to sorcery vs wizardry, framing LLM-orchestration as a legitimate alternative form of expertise
  • ↑Mathematicians will benefit and AI acts as an infinite-monkey-like theorem generator amplifying human work
  • ~Encourages the author to continue simplifying until they personally understand the proof
  • ↓Criticizes the author for burdening experts with cold emails and freeloading on human help while paying LLM companies
  • ↑Praises the author's rare skill of orchestrating and judging LLM output without deep domain expertise