It's an example of Alfred Whitehead's quote: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about

It's an example of Alfred Whitehead's quote: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” We can do property based testing with less thinking than if we try to prove correctness. We are exploiting the ability of the computer to run millions or even billions of tests. It's the enormous power of today's computers that enables this to work. The theorem prover approach would work only if it could be automatic: press a button, get the proof (after some acceptable delay). Otherwise, look at all the expensive manual effort you just signed up for. You might think that as computers get faster, theorem proving becomes easier. But testing becomes easier also. It's not clear testing will ever lose this race.