Theory Beyond Theorems and Proofs: A Guest Post

Scott’s foreword: I’m extremely grateful to my brilliant colleagues, Pravesh Kothari, Raghu Meka, and Prasad Raghavendra, for sharing the guest post below about how theoretical computer science (and in particlar, the STOC/FOCS/SODA conferences) should evolve to deal with the AI asteroid that’s right now slamming into our field, at least as we human theorists have practiced it since its inception. While Pravesh, Raghu, and Prasad speak only for themselves, not for myself and not for the theory community as a whole, I found their proposal of a separate “conceptual track” to be an excellent starting point for further discussion. –SA Considering the pace of developments in AI theorem provers, most would concede that the following scenario is at least plausible in the very near future: AI theorem provers could prove well-specified mathematical claims, even many well-studied ones that have been open for years, in a matter of hours. Moreover, these systems could be widely available to…