Comment by debo_
10 hours ago
> “The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say,” Lichtman says.
This is how I feel when I read any mathematics paper.
Tbh, a ton of academic papers are quite poorly written. I'm not a PhD researcher, but I did have to implement quite a few of the, (computer graphics, signals & systems etc), and with most of them, I basically reconstruct the author's tought process from scratch.
The formulas were opaque, notations unique and unconventional, terms appearing out of nowhere, sometimes standard techniques (like 'we did least-squares optimization') are expanded in detail, while other actually complex parts are glossed over.
My short academic career where I did my share of "what the hell are they saying they did" reverse engineering others' papers proved to be an excellent training for when I eventually transitioned to engineering.
The standard has fallen over the years for obvious reasons.