Re:Two-hundred-terabyte math proof is largest ever
by jerf on Friday May 27, 2016 @08:46AM
(#11785627)
I don't understand why you think CJefferson could have published their algorithm but the people in the news somehow couldn't. I guarantee you they did not write a 20-terabyte algorithm.
Re:Two-hundred-terabyte math proof is largest ever
by paulddraper on Saturday May 28, 2016 @10:52AM
(#11791827)
Maybe they had a lot of typewriters and then visited a zoo
Re:Two-hundred-terabyte math proof is largest ever
by CJefferson on Friday May 27, 2016 @09:06AM
(#11785714)
Hey, we did lots of maths too! (Well not me personally, but lots was done).
There is actually 12,418,001,077,381,302,684 semigroups of size 10. We only had to find 718,981,858,383,872 by brute force search (which still involved a whole bunch of maths and case splitting), which is 0.006% of the total. There is a whole PhD in the maths involved.
Of course, we could (and have) just published the search which has to be redone, and the maths which is required to prove the piece of search to be done.
Re:Two-hundred-terabyte math proof is largest ever
by John_Baez on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:42PM
(#11787166)
He didn't get into the news because he didn't solve a problem for which a famous mathematician (Ronald Graham) had offered a prize. Also, it's somewhat more exciting to use a huge calculation to answer a yes-or-no question that anyone can understand, rather than to count a huge number of fairly obscure gadgets: semigroups of size 10.
(Personally I love semigroups, and I think it's cool that you counted all the ones of size 10. But any story about them in the popular press would focus on the sheer size of the calculation rather than what it actually achieved.)
Re:Two-hundred-terabyte math proof is largest ever
by ifdefdebug on Friday May 27, 2016 @10:21AM
(#11786209)
OK, sounds interesting enough. So maybe your publication didn't make it into the news because the problem you solved didn't have Pythagoras in it's name :)
This problem has much more than just a search tree. They had to check 10 to 2300 possibilities to proof their counter example, so a simple search tree was no option and they had to boil it down to "just under 1 trillion". So lots of maths involved here.