[HN Gopher] Show HN: Goldbach Conjecture up to 4*10^18+7*10^13
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Show HN: Goldbach Conjecture up to 4*10^18+7*10^13
Achieved a new world record in verifying the Goldbach Conjecture
using grid computing, by extending the verification up to 4
quadrillion (4x1018) + 70 trillion (7x1013). My grid computing
system - Gridbach is a cloud-based distributed computing system
accessible from any PC or smartphone. It requires no login or app
installation. The high-performance WASM (WebAssembly) binary code
is downloaded as browser content, enabling computation on the
user's browser. [Website] https://gridbach.com/ [Medium]
https://medium.com/@jay_gridbach/grid-computing-shatters-wor...
Author : jay_gridbach
Score : 218 points
Date : 2025-04-19 06:11 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| laurent_du wrote:
| Impressive work! I did my share and added one billion verified
| numbers to your total, now you just need to get (almost) another
| billion of people to do the same and you'll achieve your next
| goal!
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thanks for the cheer! I will keep going.
| kazinator wrote:
| "No one has proven it mathematically up until now" is bad grammar
| in relation to the intended meaning. This idiom of English
| conveys the meaning "it has now been proven mathematically, but
| never before now; this is the first time".
|
| What Hiroaki wants here is "no one has proven it mathematically".
| Full stop.
|
| Or "no one has proven it mathematically to this day", or "no one
| has proven it mathematically so far".
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thank you for your advice! It helped me to understand how
| native speakers take this sentense. I have just corrected to
| "no one has proven it mathematically to this day".
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| In this setting, the preferred word is "proved".
| weinzierl wrote:
| Not a native speaker, here. Do you mean "proved" is
| preferred in a mathematical context?
| tiniestcabbage wrote:
| Not who you were replying to, but yes, it's a special
| case. For anything not having to do with a formal math-
| like proof, you want "has proven" instead of "has
| proved." It's super weird.
|
| We only have a few of these in English, where one of the
| tenses of the verb changes depending on the subject
| matter, but they do exist. The only other one I can think
| of off the top of my head is _hang_ : past and participle
| "hanged"/"have hanged" (to execute or be executed via
| hanging from the neck) versus "hung"/"have hung" (any
| other meaning).
|
| Hope that helps!
|
| Edit: fixed my example to better match the original text.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| This doesn't match my experience, and no dictionary I've
| checked says the past participle depends on the context;
| only that "proven" and "proved" can both be used (in any
| context). See e.g.
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proven#Verb
|
| I'm not a mathematician though, so maybe this is a
| genuine semantic convention that neither I nor my
| dictionary are aware of. Maybe it's just that some
| _mathematical_ style guides say to prefer "proved", for
| consistency, not that it really depends on the context?
| computerfriend wrote:
| Also not aware of it, but am mathematically trained and
| would always say "proved".
| tel wrote:
| I would also always use that in a mathematical context
| but feel it's weird to hear, say, "proved in a court of
| law".
| kazinator wrote:
| Grammatically, or semantically?
| kazinator wrote:
| It seems to me that in North American English, we use the
| proven participle as an adjective (almost exclusively?).
| So that is to say a remedy, having been proved effective,
| is then considered "proven effective". This usage is
| drilled into people's heads by advertisements.
|
| It feels sort of like the difference between gilded and
| golden. Something that has been gilded now has a golden
| surface. Now golden has that en suffix like some
| participles, but isn't one. It's a pure adjective.
| kazinator wrote:
| The curious situation is that verbs similar to _prove_
| have past participles which are just the same as the past
| tense. Even _approve_!
|
| You don't say "your application has been approven".
|
| Or "the problem has been solven".
|
| Or "the quantity halved again, like it had halven
| before".
|
| Or "that function has misbehaven again".
|
| Or "I have moven the funds to the correct account".
|
| Yet, "proven" is accepted.
| dmurray wrote:
| But, "I have given", "I have woven", "I have forgiven",
| and indeed "I have disproven" (also disproved). "-n" for
| a past participle of a verb like this is neither
| universal nor unique to _prove_. I believe you just have
| to learn English 's irregular verbs; there are no useful
| rules to follow.
| kazinator wrote:
| Give has an irregular past tense though. I think if the
| past tense were _gived_ , probably the past participle
| would be the same.
|
| Same with: write, wrote, written; smite, smote, smitten;
| bit, bit, bitten; hide, hid, hidden; ride, ride, ridden;
| drive, drove, driven.
|
| There's a pattern that the verbs with the en participles
| do not have ed regular past tenses. They have ove, ote,
| ode, it, id past tenses.
|
| There are exceptions though like swell, swelled, swollen.
| It's fuzzy enough that any -en past participle will sound
| fine if you just get used to hearing it.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| "Proven" is not incorrect, although sometimes proscribed.
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/proven#Usage_notes
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I would like to note, just for fun, that "proofed" also
| exists and means something else entirely.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| The "to this day" is in my opinion unnecessary - you could
| phrase it as "no one has proved it mathematically".
|
| Alternatively, "it has yet to be proved mathematically".
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thank you. Just removed "to this day".
| jey wrote:
| Btw despite the helpful pedanticism[1] of HN, I think
| your English is impeccable and idiomatically natural for
| someone who has probably not spent much time in immersive
| spoken English environments.
|
| 1. pedantry
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Yes absolutely. I did not intend my suggestion to be
| interpreted as any kind of criticism.
| ewalk153 wrote:
| If you want to imply some likelihood for it to be proven, you
| might write "yet to be proven". Language subtleties...
| kazinator wrote:
| "to this day" creates an emphasis, like that it is
| surprising/amazing that such an old problem is not yet
| solved.
| tromp wrote:
| Does the gridbach server trust all submitted results to be
| correct, or can it somehow verify them (much faster than the
| outsourced computation) ? I managed to contribute 2B
| verifications in a few minutes.
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thanks for giving it a try. The Gridbach server only accepts
| computed result sent from my component.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| But how do you make sure the user actually runs your
| component without any modification?
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| All I can tell here is that I do certain level of
| valication on server side. As one of the goals of this
| project is to popularize the fun of mathematics among the
| general public, I think I would need to avoid a open
| network configuration to strictly conduct academic
| verification. The algorithm itself is publicly opened, so
| anyone can verify the computation step is correct or not.
| https://github.com/nakatahr/gridbach-core
| comboy wrote:
| zk-SNARKS maybe?
| Sesse__ wrote:
| For demonstrating verification of a conjecture, surely
| you can do much simpler things than a zero-knowledge
| proof: Send one of the primes.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| It would still take a nontrivial amount of computation to
| do all the verification afterwards. Back of the envelope
| calculations suggest it should less than 100x longer to
| find the two primes than to verify them.
| yujzgzc wrote:
| It'd be neat to do the verification in the same manner by
| redistributing one client's results to another, therefore
| obtaining a proof modulo client collusion.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I am curious about alternatives or solutions in such a
| setting / context.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Say smaller prime is less then 10,000. Then this one or
| two Byte per Nummer. E.g. 100 Mio number is already 100mb
| or
| montroser wrote:
| That sounds interesting. How does that verification work?
| oefrha wrote:
| I had a brief look at the network traffic and code. The network
| communication is very simple:
|
| To request a new batch: POST
| https://jqarehgzwnyelidzmhrn.supabase.co/rest/v1/rpc/get_job
| apikey: ... authorization: Bearer ...
| {"_client_hash":"..."}
|
| returns something like { "jobId":
| 755344, "message": "get_job() succeeded, got jobId:
| 755344 as a new one" }
|
| which means the client should check
| 4000075534400000000-4000075534500000000.
|
| Once done: POST
| https://jqarehgzwnyelidzmhrn.supabase.co/rest/v1/rpc/put_job
| apiKey: ... authorization: Bearer ...
| {"_client_hash": "...","_job_id": 755344,"_status":
| 1,"_elapsed_time": 19.54,"_p": 3463,"_q":
| "4000075534448687929"}
|
| Here, _client_hash is generated by
| wasmHash(`{"method":"Hash"}`) in /js/worker.js (yes, the
| payload is a fixed string), and while I didn't try to
| disassemble the wasm, one can pause execution and repeatedly
| call wasmHash() to observe it's basically a TOTP that changes
| every 10s, so it doesn't carry any mathematical information.
|
| Therefore, all the info that can be used for verification on
| the server is a single pair of _p and _q adding up to one
| number in the entire range. That's the extent of the
| verification.
|
| One can of course patch the code to check a single number
| before reporting that the entire range has been checked. Pretty
| sure it's impossible for the server to detect that.
|
| Correct me if I made a mistake somewhere.
|
| Edit: On second thought, maybe the specific number reported
| back is deterministically chosen in a way that relies on
| finishing all the checks in the range, and thus can be compared
| with other reported results for the same range?
|
| Even in that case, the server can't verify the work without
| repeating it. mersenne.org hands out a double checking job
| about _8 years later_ presumably to thwart determined
| attackers.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.mersenne.org/various/math.php
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Yeah, I mean what OP doing is statistically searching for
| counterexample at worst, but without verification about the
| completeness of the range. Only if we assign jobs randomly
| and multiple times, we may believe in the truth about the
| whole range, at least under the assumption, that there is
| enough people and no big enough attacker.
| londons_explore wrote:
| So this conjecture was validated up to 4,000,000,000,000,000,000.
|
| And this project has increased that number to
| 4,000,010,000,000,000,000.
|
| Increasing the limit by 0.00025%
|
| Not totally sure this is a good use of the compute/brainpower...
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| It's a better use of compute/brainpower than dissing someone's
| passion.
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| @londons_explore @JohnKemeny Thanks you for your interst to
| my project! I have to admit the computation speed is slower
| than I expected. I have a plan to develop GPU version of
| computation client which could be much faster. Also I am
| happy to have feedbacks from for updating this project.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| What if my passion is serial killing? Your brain is running
| on pure feelgoodium when you post such drivel.
| psalaun wrote:
| I thought the same. The resulting UX is really nice though, and
| the stack is interesting. If the author does publish other blog
| posts about the technical side, this project may help other
| people start their own distributed calculation project on more
| fruitful issues for the society, and I guess that'd be a win.
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thank you for the kind comment! I'll put out a blog post
| about my tech stack sometime.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Not that it changes much... but 7*10^13 instead of 10^13.
|
| I don't know about making a judgement call on what a good use
| of computer or brainpower is, it seems like a fun enough
| project in many ways, but in terms of claims worth headlining
| about the project I agree wholeheartedly.
| schoen wrote:
| How does the efficiency of the WASM version compare to running
| the same algorithm as native code?
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Comparing the performance of WASM Go version v.s. native Go
| command line version, the native code is faster. There should
| be certain overhead using WASM I guess.
| waitforit wrote:
| > 4 quadrillion (4x1018) + 70 trillion (7x1013)
|
| That's 4 quintillion.
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thank you, I have just fixed it.
| dfc wrote:
| You also need to fix this sentence:
|
| "i aim to push this farther to 5 quadrillion."
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thank you, I have just fixed it. This is so helpful, thank
| you from the bottom of my heart.
| dfc wrote:
| Keep doing stuff you like.
| vlz wrote:
| Running this now. I like how they have a big "Number of
| counterexamples found: 0" in the UI. Imagine they would find a
| counterexample on your machine... From time to time I switch to
| the tab to make sure the zero is still a zero (I guess there is
| basically no chance, but who knows?)
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Haha, finding even a single counterexample would be a
| nightmare.
| staunton wrote:
| Surely, finding a counterexample would be huge news, a
| noteworthy advance in mathematics, and thus a great and
| widely praised achievement.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It'd also be an end to the project and would make the
| conjecture far less interesting.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| IMO it would make the conjecture far _more_ interesting,
| as it would be a surprise to most people who have thought
| about the problem.
|
| Many natural questions would arise, starting with "Is
| this the only counterexample?"
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Possibly, but it would join other false conjectures such
| as Euler's sum of powers conjecture - posed in 1769 and
| no counterexample found until 1966. There's only been
| three primitive counterexamples found so far.
|
| (I got that from
| https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/514/conjectures-
| tha... which features some other false conjectures that
| may be of interest to you)
| Karliss wrote:
| I call BS on this one. Placing a penny on top of skyscraper
| doesn't make you a builder of highest building. Still an
| interesting (more than) weekend project but not a meaningful
| record.
|
| Time required to compute next range grows very slowly and this
| project has only computed the incremental part from 4*10^18 to
| 4*10^18+7*10^13 . It would have taken previous record holder
| extra 0.002% time get those additional 7*10^13.
|
| A meaningful record needs to either reproduce old one or beat it
| by significant margin. Otherwise you get meaningless +1 like
| this.
|
| By my estimates (~7s to compute 10^8 large chunk) new "record"
| represents ~60days worth of single core compute. Run it on
| multiple threads and you essentially get 3-4days worth compute on
| single modern computer.
|
| And it does so at rate which is much worse than previous record
| using 2012/2013 hardware. Previous record software was able to do
| 10^12 window in 48minutes on single i3 core from 2013. That's
| roughly 24x faster using the old software on 10year old low end
| computer compared to the new software on new hardware. Previous
| record represents ~133000 days of single core compute, probably
| less since majority of it likely run on something better than i3.
|
| Unless author gets it to maliciously run on a popular website
| with at least 10^5 users(concurrently every minute not 10^5
| unique during day), 5*10^18 doesn't seem reachable this way.
| Getting a data center to donate computing hours would also work,
| but in that case you could use more efficient native software
| like the one from 2013 (which was order of magnitude faster even
| then) or rewrite of it optimized for modern hardware. The current
| webassembly one only makes sense if you can get random individual
| volunteers do donate compute.
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thank you for your comment. I will keep going to make this
| meaningful in some extent. The website message itself could be
| overstatement, but to be honest I am not trying to compete the
| predecessor. I am now trying to contact the predecessor to have
| feedback from him.
| Turneyboy wrote:
| I absolutely agree. Not re-running the computation for the
| first 4*10^18 and claiming a new record is absolutely
| disingenuous. I could verify just a single example that hasn't
| been covered before and claim a new record with this logic.
|
| That is not to say that this is not a cool project. The
| distributed nature and running so seamlessly directly in the
| browser is definitely cool and allows people to contribute
| compute easily.
|
| It may be that grandiose claims of new records are needed to
| make people donate their computational resources but I am not a
| fan of deceptive claims like this.
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| I know there haven't been any scientific progress yet, and I
| must admit that I gave it an easy-to-understand title to
| attract visitors to the site. I originally started this
| project out of curiosity to see what discoveries might lie
| ahead. For instance, my system is collecting `p` - least
| primes of a Goldbach partition. I am curious if there is any
| p larger than 9781. https://sweet.ua.pt/tos/goldbach.html
| FabHK wrote:
| > Placing a penny on top of skyscraper
|
| Great intuitive metaphor, btw.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| I wanted to see how this compares.
|
| ---
|
| Burj Khalifa - 828m
|
| US Penny - 1.52mm (0.00152m)
|
| Adding a US penny to the Burj Khalifa would therefore make it
| 0.000183% taller.
|
| --
|
| Original work - 4,000,000,000,000,000,000
|
| OP's work - 70,000,000,000
|
| OP's work added 0.00000175% to the current record.
|
| ---
|
| Conclusion: adding a penny to the Burj Khalifa is actually
| >100x more constructive than this effort.
| Philpax wrote:
| Good lord, man, you don't have to be that much of an
| asshole about it.
| monster_truck wrote:
| To be equally pedantic, there is a historic practice of
| attaching spires to skyscrapers in order to claim this record
| within a city/country/etc
| Coneylake wrote:
| I contributed 32B. My work here is done
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your computation resource!
| johnisgood wrote:
| Run a Tor node and mine BTC, too. :D
| yujzgzc wrote:
| I thought there'd be a plot twist by the point I read 20 seconds
| into the article, letting me know that the algorithm was in fact
| already being run on my cell phone as I was reading about it...
| (Which would be a fine use of HN's traffic IMO!)
| briansm wrote:
| Interesting that the verified 4-quintillion range is well within
| 64-bit integer math range (18 quintillion or 9 quintillion
| signed), no need to go beyond regular 64-bit computing any time
| soon.
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Exactly. At this point WASM was the best choice for me to run
| the calculation with uint64 as I wasn't sure how much BigInt in
| JavaScript is efficient.
| krylon wrote:
| When I learned programming, one of my first programs was a
| (rather lame) attempt to check the Goldbach conjecture. Over the
| years, as I learned more programming languages (first attempt was
| in C), it became my go-to program to get acquainted with a new
| language (for a few years, anyway). I never got very far, but it
| was fun to see how much performance I could squeeze out of the
| programming in various languages.
|
| So this tickles my nostalgia bone strongly. And maybe makes me
| feel a tiny bit jealous. But more excited than envious, really,
| to see people are still working on this problem.
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your experience. It's quite moving to
| know that someone in another country was going through the same
| thing I was. I implemented Goldbach in C++, C#, Java, and Go.
| krylon wrote:
| I did... let me think, it's been a while... C, Python, C++,
| Java, Common Lisp, Ada, Erlang. Also OCaml, Ruby, Haskell,
| Emacs Lisp, Lua, Rust, but I don't think any of those ever
| reached a working state.
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| I respect you have learnt a lot of programming languages
| throughout of your career.
| krylon wrote:
| My knowledge of most of these is superficial or seriously
| outdated. Particularly OCaml, Haskell, and Rust (AND
| C++!!!) are not languages I would claim to really "know".
| When I was younger, I tried to get to know as many
| languages as possible, at least in passing, but I have
| not used many of these in a professional context.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| Didn't seti@home get discontinued because the state of the art of
| computation progressed in the direction of cloud computing? Is
| the goal here to distribute the cost burden?
| nroets wrote:
| You may be right e.g. SETI now requiring more RAM than it found
| in consumer computers.
|
| Also likely that seti@home was killed due to bandwith cost
| making it uneconomical[1]. After all they were looking for
| aliens in the _data_.
|
| This "gridbach" project is much closer to GIMPS.
|
| [1]: even if seti@home got their server bandwidth for free,
| they also need to factor in the bandwidth cost of their "home"
| participants.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Running it now. On my phone (FairPhone 4) it took about 20
| seconds for a round. On my desktop (Debian Liunux, KDE, Intel(R)
| Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz), Firefox runs a round in about 12
| seconds, and Chrome in 14.
|
| I tried running in on 4 tabs on Firefox, and it did slow down a
| bit (maybe 16 seconds). All 4 tabs reported the same count, and
| it seemed not to increment for all the tabs. Also the
| initializing step was very fast on the subsequent tabs, as if it
| was reusing some data. Each tab used 100% of CPU and was doing
| different calculations. Same for Chrome.
|
| Maybe it is not designed to be run in parallel on the same
| browser? Now I just run it on two separate browsers, one tab
| each. I probably stop later today when I need the computer for
| something else.
|
| (Edit: Got a bit over 100B in 3.5 hours, stopping now. Machine
| running a tad warm, 25% CPU use, feels normal to use, but I think
| the fans are working a bit harder than normal)
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thank yoy for trying! I am aware that it doesn't work correctly
| when opening the app in multiple tabs in same window.
| pylua wrote:
| Honest question-- how is this verified for accuracy ? What if
| there is a bug ?
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| Thank you for your interst. I disclosed the core verification
| algorithm to make the procedure reviewable.
| https://github.com/nakatahr/gridbach-core
| kuberwastaken wrote:
| So cool!
| throwaway150 wrote:
| I truly hate to bring this up, knowing how much passion has gone
| into this project. But there's an important thread got buried due
| to arguments! That thread raises serious concerns about the
| validity of this bold claim.
|
| As highlighted by @tromp and @oefrha
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734877) it is clear,
| clients can cheat. So we can't be 100% sure that none of the
| clients cheated. What if a counterexample to the conjecture
| exists, but a dishonest client simply failed to report it? Math
| results require rigor and without rigor no claim can be trusted.
| Without rigor, this bold assertion remains just that. A claim,
| not a fact.
|
| OP! On top of that, you're being evasive in threads where you're
| being asked how your validation works and you went so far as to
| flag a pertinent thread. That definitely doesn't inspire
| confidence. Addressing the validation questions is absolutely
| 100% necessary if you want this to be seen as more than just a
| claim.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be dishonesty; it could be a poorly
| timed cosmic ray flipping a bit.
| GTP wrote:
| Yes, and I think this is actually more likely than someone
| intentionally modifying the code _and_ finding a
| counterexample. Related, I 'm now wondering what would happen
| if someone sent in a fake result claiming to have found a
| counterexample: will the website report the conjecture as
| proven false? It wouldn't last more than a few hours on the
| website, but I can totally see someone doing it as a prank.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Even if all clients are truthful and 100% correct, the lack of
| counter examples would still be essentially meaningless, right?
| commonlisper wrote:
| Cool project but... This is an egregious misrepresentation of the
| actual results both from significance perspective and accuracy
| perspective.
|
| A. No validation is done on server side to confirm the workers
| are reporting correct results.
|
| B. Increasing the limit by less than a thousandth of a percent
| does not make this a "world record"! If we go by that logic, I
| only have to validate one more example than you and claim a world
| record. And then you'd do the same. And then I'd do the same and
| we'll be playing "world record" ping pong all day!
|
| But "B" isn't the big problem here because we have worse problems
| "A"! Nobody (not even the OP) can tell if the results are
| accurate!
|
| No, I'm not simply dissing at a Show HN post. There are many
| comments here that explain these problems much better than I
| could.
|
| This is egregrious clickbait!
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| "Increasing the limit by less than a thousandth of a percent
| does not make this a "world record"!"
|
| Why doesn't it?
|
| "If we go by that logic, I only have to validate one more
| example than you and claim a world record."
|
| Yes. You can argue that it's not difficult enough or
| interesting enough, but you can't argue that N+1 result is not
| a world record.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Yeah, I was confused, too. That's how world records work.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| That makes sense in sports. But in math? It's trivially
| easy to generate thousands of so-called "world records"
| every second.
|
| Here's one:
|
| 4*10^18 + 7*10^13 + 1.
|
| Boom! New world record. Now add 1 and you've got another.
| Try it. Keep going. World records like this will be
| surpassed by someone else in milliseconds.
|
| Honestly, this is the first time I've heard "world record"
| used for NOT finding a counterexample. The whole thing
| feels absurd. You can keep checking numbers forever,
| calling each one a record? It's silly, to be honest. Never
| heard anyone calling these world records, before today.
|
| OP has a nice project. But the wording is so deceptive and
| so silly that it harms the credibility of the project more
| than it helps.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Isn't it more a record about the state of computing than
| the state of conjecture?
| zamadatix wrote:
| This is more like if someone pulled a truck down 2,800
| miles of road between NYC and LA in 2012, left it there,
| and then you grabbed the rope in 2025 to pull it less
| than another tenth of a mile to have "shatters world
| record" in your blog title.
|
| I.e. not only is this an extremely small increment but
| the original work did not have to be repeated. Nothing
| about the state of computing in 2012 would have prevented
| going the extra amount here, they just decided to stop.
| The original record even states (on
| https://sweet.ua.pt/tos/goldbach.html):
|
| > On a single core of a 3.3GHz core i3 processor, testing
| an interval of 10^12 integers near 10^18 takes close to
| 48 minutes
|
| So the additional work here in 2025 was the equivalent of
| running a single core of a 2012 i3 for ~70 more hours.
|
| All this is a shame as the project itself actually seems
| much more interesting than leading claims.
| anyfoo wrote:
| It's not a notable world record, but it's still a world
| record, if we're being pedantic. And math is pedantic.
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Every second is easy. Let's aim for new world records at
| a 1MHz rate.
| johnfn wrote:
| > Never heard anyone calling these world records, before
| today.
|
| You've never heard of the world record for calculating
| digits of pi?
|
| https://www.livescience.com/physics-
| mathematics/mathematics/...
| throwaway150 wrote:
| That's not comparable to finding Goldbach NON-
| counterexamples.
|
| With Goldbach, claiming a "world record" just means
| checking one more number and seeing if it is still NOT a
| counterexample. It's easy. Contrast that with computing a
| new digit of pi - something you can't achieve by simply
| incrementing a value and running a check.
|
| Finding each new digit of pi (the ones very far out) is
| not a trivial task. The computational effort increases by
| a lot as you go deeper. Something like O(n (log n)^k) for
| some k (usually k = 3).
| anyfoo wrote:
| Since this is math, I feel pedantic. It may not be a
| notable world record, but it's still a world record.
| There are infinitely many non-notable world record
| categories. I currently hold the one for saying the word
| "fbejsixbenebxhsh" the most number of times in a row.
| Nobody cares, but it's still a world record.
| nimish wrote:
| That is the literal definition of a world record here, my
| guy.
|
| Take it up with the rules.
|
| And yes, mathematically it's uninteresting. But that's
| not what is being showed off here.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > That is the literal definition of a world record here,
| my guy.
|
| I don't dispute that. If you read my comment carefully,
| you'll find that I'm calling them "world records" too. My
| point is that nobody in the math community uses "world
| record" for finding trivial non-counterexamples like
| this. There are infinitely many such "world records" and
| each one is trivial to surpass in under a second.
|
| Compare that to something like the finding a new Mersenne
| prime or calculating more digits of pi. Those records
| hold weight because they're difficult to achieve and
| stand for years.
|
| This post could've been one of the infinite,
| uninteresting "world records" if the OP had applied more
| rigor in the implementation. But due to gaps in
| verification, this post is not a world record of any kind
| because the correctness of the results can't be
| confirmed. The OP has no way to confirm the correctness
| of their data. You'd get better context by reading the
| full thread. This has already been discussed at length.
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| If you'd read the article... ;)
|
| He slightly pushed the computation past the previous world
| record, and he's continuing to push it forward with a clear
| goal. It's well within the spirit of a world record.
|
| Besides, a world record is still a world record -- it's up to
| you to decide how interesting it is. You are indeed just
| dissing on a Show HN post.
|
| Server side validation is trivial. What makes you believe that
| is not happening? That code is not available.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > If you'd read the article... ;)
|
| If you'd read the article _carefully_ , he hasn't. For all we
| know one client (or worse, several) found counterexamples but
| didn't report them back to the server. Without verification
| on the server side, there's no way to claim the entire range
| has been reliably checked.
|
| What he's shown is that many volunteers have checked a large
| portion of the numbers up to a certain bound and found no
| counterexamples. But he hasn't shown that _all_ numbers
| within that range have actually been verified. It 's entirely
| possible that some block results were falsely reported by bad
| clients. Meaning counterexamples could still be hiding in
| those falsely reported gaps, however improbable! This kind of
| lapse in rigor matters in math! This lapse in rigor
| invalidates the entire claim of the OP!
|
| > Server side validation is trivial. What makes you believe
| that is not happening? That code is not available.
|
| Please read the full thread. This has all already been
| discussed at length.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735397
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735498
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735483
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735555
|
| From the OP himself, an admission that there's no mechanism
| to ensure clients aren't submitting false results:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736281
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736558
|
| Don't get me wrong. I've said before. This is a good project.
| But the claims made in the post don't hold up to scrutiny.
|
| > a world record is still a world record
|
| This isn't particularly relevant at the moment, since OP
| can't confirm the correctness of the results!
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| Lol okay these comments do change things -- I wish these
| were pointed out in the parent comment.
|
| But I agree then. Good project; not a world record.
|
| Edit: I'm not getting any of this for the article still,
| but I trust I'm misreading something
| ta12653421 wrote:
| Grok says:
|
| Final Answer: 4.00007x10^18
|
| :-D
| jay_gridbach wrote:
| I post this as a separate comment.
|
| At this point, I am not capable with addressing the thing you
| pointed out - the way to block fake results in open network. From
| the very beginning, I don't want to make the system closed-
| network nor login required as I want people to join the
| calculation instantly. Technically, I think it is impossible to
| prevent reporting fake result as long as it is open network
| system - which means my design doesn't fit to seeking rigor.
|
| If someone starts another project that handles calculations in
| better way, I would like to learn from it.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| Your project is not bad. It's the way you've worded this post
| and your article that comes across as misleading and deceptive.
|
| There's no definitive proof that a world record has been set.
| Nor that every individual block has been processed and reported
| honestly. What is known is that the system provides a mechanism
| for volunteers to submit counterexamples if they choose to.
| That's something.
|
| It's possible for clients to act dishonestly and withhold
| counterexamples. There's an incentive to claim independent
| credit. So the clients have incentive to lie.
|
| So your project doesn't ensure that every block has been
| verified, it allows honest participants to report findings.
| That's the reality and you should frame it that way in the post
| and article.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| What's the point of that exercise? Just so we boil faster?
| gre wrote:
| Cool project. In your tooltip for "My Top 30 largest Goldbach
| ridges" you have `yilded` instead of `yielded`.
| monster_truck wrote:
| This is neat :)
|
| X3D processors seem happy with running cores*1.5 tabs as long as
| you can keep it cool, was locked at 90C overnight and it never
| throttled below 4.2. Can see they're all doing different jobs,
| wish the display was better about updating the shared state!
|
| I've submitted ~400,000,000,000 verifications so far, highest
| ridge is 5641 (18th on the dashboard). I think I've submitted far
| more than this and it isn't being counted correctly due to
| multiple tabs
|
| E: The whinging about power consumption and killing the planet
| faster is so silly, a modestly sized OLED TV uses more power than
| this
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