Hacker News

The stuff about Gabelsberger shorthand sounds ludicrous to me. My father would write notes in a custom version of it until his death 2020.

Officially (i.e. in schools teaching stenography, back in the day) it was long ago replaced by "unified German shorthand" (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift IIRC), but he always considered Gabelsberger to be superior.

Well, maybe he too was one of the 6 people in the world who could read it (or yes, maybe that was hyperbole, I'm not sure) :D

From what historians of science tell us, Gödel was in any case an absolute perfectionist who mostly published work that was bulletproof. His enormous body of notes surely contained some very sharp insights, but it is unlikely that he would have produced illuminating, conclusive new theorems by chance and without realizing it. He was a very harsh reviewer of his own work.

I can't remember the exact quote but I believe I read that Gödel confided to Einstein (in their walks in Princeton) on his deep worry of his work being forgotten. If only he knew.

AI did not comment on the consistency or completeness of the notebooks.

It'd be interesting to hear about these new 14 themes of logic Gödel pursued!

Very much need a statement in there as to if AI was used in the making of the manifesto, goes to the heart of the ethical soul of the manifesto.

I’d suggest you bake it into that header line on writtten by; something like this (but edited depending how ai was used):

“Written without AI assistance by the speakers and attendees of AIE Code Summit 2026 ”

This is incredibly exciting! Gödel is unquestionably the most important logician in history, but unfortunately he published very little. For instance, the Dialectica interpretation was published approximately 20 years after his first ideas on the subject.

Plus, Jan von Plato is the world's leading expert on Gödel -- the number of people who can read Gödel's handwriting can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and I think that every single one is part of Jan von Plato's research group. If he is excited about the output, this is a huge deal.

Let's try the Voynich Manuscript next

https://aitp-conference.org/2026/slides/JvP.pdf this seems to be slide deck with some of the results.

I’m been trying to use various frontier models to decipher lost ancient languages (like Linear A).

I wonder what tactics this used, so that I can leverage in my own work.

I wonder how much expertise was actually needed to translate these notebooks. In other words, could a general purpose model one-shot these translations, or did we really need a subject matter expert to do the work? BTW - I'm not saying having a subject matter expert tackle the problem with Claude isn't useful - just wondering what the limits are!

This might be an actual concrete example of someone making themselves obsolete with AI.

> Von Plato said he had started his Gödel project in 2017 because he was facing mandatory retirement from Helsinki University. “What should I do to make myself indispensable? Oh yes, I’ll start reading Gödel’s enigmatic shorthand pages!” He received a €2.5m (£2.1m) grant from the European Research Council, taught himself Gabelsberger shorthand – “I am one of only six people who can read it in the world” – and assembled a small team.

Maybe the notebooks will contain details of his "loophole", or maybe it will have been proven true in real life by then.

> Gödel himself, when rereading his notes, would occasionally add a marginal remark: falsch! [incorrect] or schlecht! [bad].”

This is probably my favourite part of the article. On brand.

I first came to know about Gödel's incompleteness theorem while watching a video by Veritasium (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo), it's around 30 minutes but a really good video. It's from the time before Veritasium became slop. The video talks about many things that are interconnected, like the halting problem, undecidable systems like the game of life, Hilbert's dream of a finite set of axioms to prove all mathematics, and, of course, a perfect explanation of Gödel's incompleteness theorems

> Increasingly paranoid in his later years, he refused to eat food that was not cooked by his wife, and died of starvation in 1978

genius often comes with side effects

"You don't get credit for the work you don't tell anybody about"

This has been a problem long before Godel: famously, Newton tried to get credit for inventing Calculus only after Leibniz published his work, leading to a bitter dispute that lasted long after they both died.

I wonder if this problem is now going to be significantly exacerbated by AI, as mathematicians are getting more incentives to keep their works secret —

— or, to the contrary, the community will get a push to publish incomplete ideas, scratch work, etc. early to establish a record of thinking about a problem before others did.

In the end, as always, it's a social problem created by " publish or perish " institutional incentives which reward (and require!) published results, but not the work that led to to them.

This, I hope, will finally change.

A little disappointed to learn it was a guy prompting and not an OpenAI agent swarm reward hacking the goal of "prove as many theorems as possible".

I hear they're all incomplete

Nice timing for the IPO. Cooked Nvidia numbers on the 17th are still missing, and the 19th will go well!

The AI was of course trained on existing pre-AI transcriptions of Goedel's shorthand, which he was taught in school around 1920 and which was widespread and only technically "obsolete".

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-67606-3

I think we'll find godel's most pungent critiques of modern logic & mathmatics to be the maddening limits of LLMs.

"Unlocks" cool so Claude the trillion dollar technology did what any funded researcher with a computer vision algorithm could have done years ago. Wow so impressive.