> That's the highest degree of scrutiny that a proof can undergo. No it isn't. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

> That's the highest degree of scrutiny that a proof can undergo. No it isn't. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth The highest degree of scrutiny that a proof can undergo is to run the code and observe that it works. It's just ('just'), that that's usually computationally intractable, because you're trying to prove things about the entire set of possible inputs, and that set is infinite or at least extremely large. So you have to settle for lower degrees of scrutiny, that can be more easily verified.