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From: srt@duke.cs.duke.edu (Stephen R. Tate)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,sci.math
Subject: Re: Fermat's Last Theorem apparently proven
Message-ID: <11440@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Date: 30 Mar 88 17:20:29 GMT
References: <1009@sdcc13.ucsd.EDU> <7521@boring.cwi.nl> <507@sol.warwick.ac.uk>
Reply-To: srt@duke.UUCP (Stephen R. Tate)
Organization: Duke University, Durham NC
Lines: 29

In article <507@sol.warwick.ac.uk> rolf@flame.warwick.ac.uk writes:
>Bob and Jurjen are of course right that a proper mathmatical proof is
>intellectually satisfying and essential to make a hypothesis respectable
>no matter how many examples in favour of it you find.  But that isn't what
>Steven Tate and Keith were talking about.  If I am 99.99% confident in
>the validity of the Rieman hypothesis and write a program which depends
>on it to work, then I can be *reasonably* confident in my program even
>without a "proof".

Well....  that's *sort of* what I said, anyway.

It's true that unproven hypotheses can provide useful results, just
be careful how you use them.  I seemed to be lumped in with people who
underestimate the power of proofs above -- this just isn't true.
Basically, in my work, if I can't prove something, it's just as bad
as if it wasn't true.  *But*, that doesn't contradict what I said about
useful programs being possible -- it's just that I generally don't
write programs.

Lastly, I hope that if you're doing work using unproven hypotheses
(even something as plausable as the RH) that you're not working on
something critical...  I can just see someone working on this SDI stuff
saying "Well, it looks like it works", and then when the real test
comes that one case they didn't consider fails.

-- 
Steve Tate			UUCP: ..!{ihnp4,decvax}!duke!srt
				CSNET: srt@duke
				ARPA:  srt@cs.duke.edu