cs.LGJun 12, 2026

Flood and Harvest: The Provable Necessity of Trivia for Generating Valuable Mathematics via the Lens of Language Generation in the Limit

Authors: Xiaoyu LiAndi HanDai ShiZheng GaoJiaojiao JiangJunbin Gao

Organizations: University of New South Wales · University of Sydney · University of Cambridge

Abstract

AI systems coupled to proof assistants now generate formal mathematics at scale, and the gap between what a checker can verify and what a mathematician would value has become the binding constraint. We model the generation of valuable mathematics as nested language generation in the limit: a verifiable formal language FF, accessed through a membership oracle (the proof checker), contains an unknown valuable language HHH \in \mathcal{H} revealed only through an adversarial enumeration of a core CHC \subseteq H of exact density αα (the literature). Every output is valuable (H\in H), trivial (FH\in F \setminus H), or a hallucination (F\notin F). We settle four questions. First, the verifier is not taste: the collections admitting generation with breadth are exactly those of the oracle-free model, characterized fiber-wise by Angluin's condition. Second, the verifier does buy sound coverage, covering all unseen valuable statements while asserting only valid ones: possible with it, impossible without it; it relocates unavoidable errors from false to trivial. Third, and centrally, a sharp dichotomy on the tight family: generators emitting finitely many trivia achieve optimal coverage α/2α/2, while any infinite trivia allowance, even at vanishing rate, jumps the optimum to 1α/21-α/2 (both tight, for cores presented as the candidate intersection), and one generator attains both ends. The transition is in trivia count, not rate; the gap 1α1-α is the unrecorded mass. Fourth, both regimes instantiate in a compression model of mathematics. A perfect verifier cannot substitute for taste: the unbounded stream of correct-but-worthless statements is not an engineering accident but a provable necessity, since covering unrecorded valuable mathematics requires an infinite, but asymptotically negligible, stream of certified trivia.

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