I Vibed a Proof of Conway's Conjecture
A developer claims Claude produced a Lean-formalized proof of Conway's 50-year-old refinement conjecture about omnific integers.
The author spent a month using Claude to select and attack Conway's 1976 conjecture that factorizations of omnific integers admit a common refinement, in the field of surreal numbers. The resulting Lean proof passed mechanical checks in the Palomar registry but has not been independently verified by mathematicians. The post details the AI-assisted math workflow, including problem selection by the model and token-heavy iteration.
- Conway's refinement conjecture: any two factorizations of an omnific integer admit a common refinement.
- The author used Claude to pick the problem and develop a proof over roughly one month.
- The proof passed Palomar registry mechanical checks; independent expert verification remains pending.
- Vendors
- Anthropic
- Products
- LeanPalomar registry
- AI models
- Claude
From the original article
15 min read at overreacted.ioA few months ago, AI math results started making headlines. “Do a breakthrough” became a Twitter meme. Naturally, I became curious whether I, too, a math noob , can find some open mathematical problem and then have a frontier model solve it.
By m-hodges · overreacted.io
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