{"id":1170,"date":"2012-11-17T16:39:33","date_gmt":"2012-11-17T21:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1170"},"modified":"2019-01-28T14:33:41","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T20:33:41","slug":"proving-without-explaining-and-verifying-without-understanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1170","title":{"rendered":"Proving Without Explaining, and Verifying Without Understanding"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, I was at a “Symposium on the Nature of Proof”<\/a> at UPenn, to give a popular talk about theoretical computer scientists’ expansions of the notion of mathematical proof (to encompass things like probabilistic, interactive, zero-knowledge, and quantum proofs).  This really is some of the easiest, best, and most fun material in all of CS theory to popularize.  Here are iTunes videos<\/a> of my talk and the three others in the symposium: I’m video #2, logician Solomon Feferman is #3, attorney David Rudovsky is #4, and mathematician Dennis DeTurck is #5.  Also, here are my PowerPoint slides<\/a>.  Thanks very much to Scott Weinstein at Penn for organizing the symposium.<\/p>\n

In other news, the Complexity Zoo<\/a> went down yet again<\/em> this week, in a disaster that left vulnerable communities without access to vital resources like nondeterminism and multi-prover interaction.  Luckily, computational power has since been restored: with help from some volunteers, I managed to get the Zoo up and running again on my BlueHost account.  But while the content is there, it looks<\/em> horrendously ugly; all the formatting seems to be gone.  And the day I agreed to let the Zoo be ported to MediaWiki was the day I lost the ability to fix such problems.  What I really need, going forward, is for someone else simply to take charge<\/strong> of maintaining the Zoo: it’s become painfully apparent both that it needs to be done and that I lack the requisite IT skills.  If you want to take a crack at it, here’s an XML dump<\/a> of the Zoo from a few months ago (I don’t think it’s really changed since then).  You don’t even need to ask my permission: just get something running<\/strong>, and if it looks good, I’ll anoint you the next Zookeeper and redirect complexityzoo.com to point to your URL.<\/p>\n

Update (Nov. 18):<\/strong><\/span> The Zoo is back up with the old formatting and graphics!!  Thanks so much to Charles Fu for setting up the new complexity-zoo.net<\/a> (as well as Ethan, who set up a slower site that tided us over).  I’ve redirected complexityzoo.com to point to complexity-zoo.net, though it might take some time for your browser cache to clear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, I was at a “Symposium on the Nature of Proof” at UPenn, to give a popular talk about theoretical computer scientists’ expansions of the notion of mathematical proof (to encompass things like probabilistic, interactive, zero-knowledge, and quantum proofs).  This really is some of the easiest, best, and most fun material in all of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-complexity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1170"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4105,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions\/4105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}