Terms of Use

1. Agreement

By using this website you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, the appropriate response is to close the page, which costs nothing and is not tracked.

These terms apply to the site at this domain, including all articles, the step solver, and any other page served here. They do not apply to external sites reached through links, which have their own terms and their own practices.

2. What this site is and is not

Proof & Machine is an independent editorial publication about artificial intelligence and mathematics. It publishes essays, explanations and analysis.

It is not a source of professional advice of any kind. Nothing here is educational advice, engineering advice, investment advice, legal advice or a recommendation to adopt or avoid any product, technology or approach. Articles discuss the capabilities and limitations of software systems, sometimes critically, and those discussions are opinion informed by evidence rather than professional guidance you should act on without your own judgement.

If you are making a decision with real consequences, in a classroom, on an engineering project, or anywhere money or safety is involved, consult someone qualified and accountable for that decision.

3. Accuracy

Articles are researched from primary sources and checked before publication. That process reduces errors and does not eliminate them.

Two categories of inaccuracy are inevitable and worth naming specifically.

Claims about the current capability of AI systems become stale quickly. A statement about how a model performs on a task is a statement about a particular version of a particular system at a particular time. Every article carries a publication date and you should read capability claims as scoped to that date.

Benchmark figures, record values and performance numbers are quoted from their sources and were accurate when checked. Records get broken, benchmarks get revised, and papers get corrected. Where we learn of a change, the article gets updated.

The site is provided as-is. No warranty is given that any content is accurate, complete, current or fit for any purpose. Corrections are welcome and handled per the process on the contact page.

4. The step solver

The calculator at /tool/ runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is transmitted anywhere, stored on any server, or seen by anyone.

It uses IEEE 754 double-precision floating point arithmetic, with all the limitations that implies. Decimal fractions are not represented exactly. Integers above 2 to the power of 53 lose precision. Repeated operations accumulate rounding error. The tool page documents these in detail and the factorisation function refuses inputs where the limits would produce silently wrong results.

The solver is provided as a demonstration and a convenience. Do not rely on it for anything consequential without independent verification, which is advice we would give about any calculator including the one on your phone.

The source is available at /assets/solver.js and may be reused freely, with or without attribution, including commercially. It is offered with no warranty of any kind. If it is wrong, it is wrong in your project too, and that is your risk to evaluate.

5. The contact form

The form on the contact page posts to a third-party relay which forwards the message to our inbox. Using it means your message and the details you enter pass through that service, subject to its terms and its retention practices, which we do not control. The relay is how messages reach us, so using the form means accepting that hop.

Do not send anything confidential, personal data about a third party, or anything you would not want held in an ordinary email inbox. There is no encryption beyond the transport layer and no undertaking of confidentiality.

Sending a pitch or a correction does not create any obligation on our part to publish, reply or credit, and does not transfer any rights in what you send. If we publish a correction that came from you, we credit you by name unless you ask us not to.

6. Your licence to use the content

You may read, print, save and share pages here for any purpose, personal or commercial.

You may quote excerpts freely with attribution to Proof & Machine and a link to the source article. No permission is required. This covers academic citation, journalism, teaching materials, internal documents and commercial writing alike.

You may translate articles. Attribute the original, link to it, and tell us so we can link back to your translation.

You may not republish complete articles without permission. Ask, and the answer is usually yes. The reason for asking is not control over distribution; it is that pieces here often contain a paragraph qualifying the headline claim, and a republication that drops it produces a materially different article under our name.

You may not present content from this site as your own work, remove attribution, or alter an article's meaning while retaining its attribution.

7. Automated access and AI training

Reasonable crawling for search indexing and archiving is fine.

Bulk scraping that degrades service for others is not. There is no rate limit to trip because there is no server-side code, but a crawler hammering a static host is still imposing a cost, and the courteous behaviour is a request every few seconds with a real user agent.

On training: the content here is published openly and we are aware that open publication and machine training are not separable in practice. We do not attempt to prohibit it and we would not be able to detect it. We would prefer attribution where a model surfaces content derived from these articles, and we recognise that preference is not a mechanism.

What we do ask is that if you build a system that answers questions using this material, you preserve the qualifications. The articles here are written so that the caveat travels with the claim, and a summary that keeps the claim and drops the caveat produces the exact misinformation these pieces exist to correct.

8. Third-party content and links

Articles link to papers, repositories, documentation and other sites. Those links are references, not endorsements, and we do not control what is on the other end.

Where an article describes a product, a company or a research group, that description is editorial comment based on published material and observed behaviour. Names and trademarks belong to their owners and appear here nominatively, to identify what is being discussed. No affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement is implied in either direction.

9. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any loss or damage arising from use of this site or reliance on its content. This includes direct, indirect, incidental and consequential loss, and it includes loss arising from errors in the step solver, from acting on an article's conclusions, or from the site being unavailable.

This limitation does not exclude liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and in some jurisdictions that includes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Where a limitation here is unenforceable in your jurisdiction, it is severed and the remainder continues to apply.

If you are a consumer, these terms do not affect your statutory rights.

10. Availability

No uptime commitment is given. The site may be unavailable for maintenance, for hosting reasons, or for no reason. Content may be changed, moved or removed at any time.

Where an article is removed rather than corrected, which has not happened yet and would be unusual, the URL will return a page explaining that it was removed and why, rather than a bare 404.

11. Changes to these terms

These terms may change. The date at the top records the last revision.

Material changes will be noted on this page for at least sixty days after they take effect, describing what changed. Continued use after a change constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

There is no mailing list to notify, because there is no mailing list.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which the publication operates. Where mandatory consumer protection law in your own jurisdiction gives you rights that these terms would otherwise restrict, that law prevails.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms go through the contact form. Pick the correction topic for an error in an article, which is the queue that moves fastest.