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I don't understand your objection. Couldn't you have published just the algorithm of your proof - an deterministic algorithm to reproduce those terabytes of dat

I don't understand your objection. Couldn't you have published just the algorithm of your proof - an deterministic algorithm to reproduce those terabytes of data is arguably a compressed version of the data itself, and thus of the proof. 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.

jerf 10y ago
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.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Maybe they had a lot of typewriters and then visited a zoo
CJefferson 10y ago
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.
- ifdefdebug 10y ago
  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 :)
- John_Baez 10y ago
  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.)

jerf 10y ago

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.

paulddraper 10y ago
Maybe they had a lot of typewriters and then visited a zoo

CJefferson 10y ago

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.

ifdefdebug 10y ago
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 :)
John_Baez 10y ago
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.)