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Comment by jasongross

14 hours ago

There is a tradeoff between the compute required to generate a proof and the compute required to check it. Fully generic methods such as SMT solvers require compute exponential in the number of variables in scope and lines of code in a single function. Breaking the exponential requires (and is perhaps equivalent to) understanding the code in sufficient detail (cf https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11779). In practice, the computational cost of semi-automated proof generation is a significant bottleneck, cf https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/130763?show=full and https://jasongross.github.io/papers/2022-superlinear-slownes... .