You should try asking an LLM to look for previous papers using similar ideas. The current/frontier generation of math AI is unfortunately very bad at citing the relevant literature for techniques its using.
> the exact Barnette argument appears quite novel, but nearly every ingredient in its cancellation trick has a recognizable ancestor.
> The closest precedent is much closer than I expected: in fully packed O(n) loop models, people have been assigning complex phases to the two orientations of a loop and making them cancel for decades. At n=0, the phases are literally +I and -I. And the n->0 limit has specifically been used to extract Hamiltonian cycles/walks.
You can judge better than me. But it's definitely worth it having a research assistant AI with you when reading these papers.
I asked GPT here: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ac5fd7d-0390-83ed-a02a-6d80fc64f6... and it says:
> the exact Barnette argument appears quite novel, but nearly every ingredient in its cancellation trick has a recognizable ancestor.
> The closest precedent is much closer than I expected: in fully packed O(n) loop models, people have been assigning complex phases to the two orientations of a loop and making them cancel for decades. At n=0, the phases are literally +I and -I. And the n->0 limit has specifically been used to extract Hamiltonian cycles/walks.
You can judge better than me. But it's definitely worth it having a research assistant AI with you when reading these papers.