Re: "The QED Project"

Hi Freek,

The first sentence at http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/qed/ is:

"The aim of the QED project is to build a single, distributed,
computerized repository that rigorously represents all important,
established mathematical knowledge."

I think this is a target of multiple projects today - one of them Mizar,
but e.g. all the "semantic wiki for formal math" recent suggestions are
also driven by this goal (and by the huge practical success of Wikipedia,
showing that such things are really possible in a couple of years if
started and coordinated well).

The other point is that no project is sofar nowhere near achieving the
goal. I think that the "goal" should rather be defined as a process that
gradually tries to involve as many mathematicians/students as possible,
and continuously tries to make formalization easier and easier for
newcomers. That is the other attractive and probably very productive thing
about the original idea of Wiki: it is never "finished" and "stable", and
tries to be very friendly to fresh solutions. I fear that without such
supportive climate and humble awareness of the huge existing bottlenecks
that are waiting to be solved, no project will succeed.

So I think that in some sense the world is still waiting for the proper
effort towards implementation of QED. We know that it is possible, but it
is both a technical problem, and a human resource management problem.
Especially solving the latter is in my opinion the crucial thing. The only
way how a "technical solution" could be more important than the "human
solution" is if very good tools and AI are developed, which will
practically turn the "normal" mathematical papers into "formal"
mathematical papers. E.g. TeX is an example of a technical solution that
changed the world in a similar sense, and you never know where AI (for
automated formalization of "normal" math) is :-).

Josef

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Freek Wiedijk wrote: