private_messaging comments on The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 May 2008 08:16AM

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Comment author: Kindly 18 April 2013 04:28:23AM 2 points [-]

If I could show you an example of mathematicians running ongoing computer simulations in order to test theories (well. Test conjectures for progressively higher values), would that demonstrate otherwise to you?

This happens, but the conclusion is different. No matter how many cases of an infinite-case conjecture I test, it's not going to be accepted as proof or even particularly valid evidence that the conjecture is true. The point of doing this is more to check if there are any easy counter-examples, or to figure out what's going on in greater detail, but then you go back and prove it.

Comment author: private_messaging 18 April 2013 05:00:07AM 2 points [-]

That is evidence that a weaker conjecture (e.g. that the conjecture holds over some very huge range of numbers) is true.

And the proof verification can be seen as an empirical process. In fact it should be, given that proof verification is an experiment run on a physical machine which has limited reliability and a probability of error.