kok on the COQ of CoQ in coq via Coq (Rocq)
posted jul 2025
Before I entered university, I mentioned that I was excited to take a course about the Coq proof assistant, and joked that I’d one day write a blog post titled “kok on coq”.
A few years on, I did in fact take that course (and it ended up being my joint-favourite course in university)! But I never got around to that blog post, and I no longer have the intellectual faculties to write an actual interesting Coq proof. Coq also got renamed to Rocq this year, so time’s running out.
Disambiguation:
- COQ: Cost of Quality, a businessy term which introduces the concept of a “cost of appraisal” that is incurred when performing “testing, inspection, and other activities” (maybe a proof? :D)
- CoQ: Coenzyme Q_10, a component of the mitochondrial electron transport chain that’s recently become a popular dietary supplement
- coq: “rooster” (chicken) in French, also a national symbol of France and a meat I like to eat
- Coq (Rocq): an interactive theorem prover, or also a dependently-typed functional programming language, though to some extent that clarification is tautological
Let’s figure out the (Cost of Quality of (appraising (Coenzyme Q_10 concentrations in chicken) via Coq))!
(Coenzyme Q_10 concentrations in chicken)
Wikipedia tells us the following about Coenzyme Q_10 concentrations in chicken:
| Part | CoQ10 (mg/kg) |
|---|---|
| Breast | 8 - 17 |
| Thigh | 24 - 25 |
| Wing | 11 |
(appraising (Coenzyme Q_10 concentrations in chicken) via Coq)
One way we could evaluate Coenzyme Q_10 concentrations in chicken is to figure out which chicken part is the most value-for-money if we were optimizing for Coenzyme Q_10 content.
According the FairPrice website, the prices of chicken parts are as follows:
| Part | Price (SGD/kg) |
|---|---|
| Breast | 6.95 |
| Thigh | 3.90 |
| Wing | 4.48 |
This gives us a very reasonable value metric:
value = CoQ10 (mg/kg) / Price (SGD/kg)