One particularly difficult case is when the thing you’re trying to verify has a subtle flaw.
Consider Kempe’s proof of the four colour theorem, which was generally accepted for eleven years before being refuted. (It is in fact a proof of the five-colour theorem)
And of course, subtle flaws are much more likely in things that someone has designed to deceive you.
Against an intelligent adversary, verification might be much harder than generation. I’d cite Marx and Freud as world-sweeping obviously correct theories that eventually turned out to be completely worthless. I can remember a time when both were taken very seriously in academic circles.
Exactly. You can’t generalize from “natural” examples to adversarial examples. If someone is trying hard to lie to you about something, verifying what they say can very well be harder than finding the truth would have been absent their input, particularly when you don’t know if and what they want to lie about.
I’m not an expert in any of these and I’d welcome correction, but I’d expect verification to be at least as hard as “doing the thing yourself” in cases like espionage, hacking, fraud and corruption.
One particularly difficult case is when the thing you’re trying to verify has a subtle flaw.
Consider Kempe’s proof of the four colour theorem, which was generally accepted for eleven years before being refuted. (It is in fact a proof of the five-colour theorem)
And of course, subtle flaws are much more likely in things that someone has designed to deceive you.
Against an intelligent adversary, verification might be much harder than generation. I’d cite Marx and Freud as world-sweeping obviously correct theories that eventually turned out to be completely worthless. I can remember a time when both were taken very seriously in academic circles.
Exactly. You can’t generalize from “natural” examples to adversarial examples. If someone is trying hard to lie to you about something, verifying what they say can very well be harder than finding the truth would have been absent their input, particularly when you don’t know if and what they want to lie about.
I’m not an expert in any of these and I’d welcome correction, but I’d expect verification to be at least as hard as “doing the thing yourself” in cases like espionage, hacking, fraud and corruption.