🚀 go-pugleaf

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
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