Claude Deciphers Gödel's Shorthand Notebooks, Finding 663 Theorems
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Finnish logician Jan von Plato used Anthropic's Claude to work through 1,009 pages of Kurt Gödel's 1940s Gabelsberger-shorthand workbooks, a task that had been advancing at roughly a page a week. Within a couple of days Claude produced a 650-page explanation and identified 663 theorems Gödel had proved, sketched or conceived. Von Plato said the output had to be checked page by page. Run through the Coq proof assistant, about 400 of the theorems verified as stated, about 200 needed repair — for instance a more precise statement or an added assumption — and about 50 were false. Von Plato said Claude's reconstruction of a proof of the independence of the axiom of choice, which passed Coq, suggests Gödel had the result in the 1940s, and that the workbooks contain more than a dozen unexplored themes in logic.
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Finnish logician Jan von Plato used Claude to digest 1,009 pages of Kurt Gödel's 1940s Gabelsberger-shorthand workbooks, a task that had been progressing at about a page a week. Claude produced a 650-page explanation and identified 663 theorems Gödel had proved, sketched or conceived; when run through the Coq proof assistant, about 400 verified as stated, about 200 needed repair and about 50 were false. Von Plato said Claude's reconstruction of a proof of the independence of the axiom of choice, which passed Coq, suggests Gödel had the result in the 1940s, and that the workbooks contain more than a dozen unexplored themes in logic.
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