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Cool project but... This is an egregious misrepresentation of the actual results both from significance perspective and accuracy perspective. A. No validation

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 1y ago
"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 1y ago
  Yeah, I was confused, too. That’s how world records work.
  - peeters 1y ago
    I think they're saying that because it builds on the previous result having any one effort claim a record doesn't really make sense. Like imagine there was a record for longest novel published, and what you did was take the previous longest novel and add the word "hello" to the end of it. Does the person who added "hello" get the record?
  - throwaway150 1y ago
    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.
    - nimish 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        > 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.
    - dleeftink 1y ago
      Isn't it more a record about the state of computing than the state of conjecture?
lanyard-textile 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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=43735397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735555 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=43736281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736558 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!
  - 1y ago

lIl-IIIl 1y ago

"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 1y ago
Yeah, I was confused, too. That’s how world records work.
- peeters 1y ago
  I think they're saying that because it builds on the previous result having any one effort claim a record doesn't really make sense. Like imagine there was a record for longest novel published, and what you did was take the previous longest novel and add the word "hello" to the end of it. Does the person who added "hello" get the record?
- throwaway150 1y ago
  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.
  - nimish 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      > 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.
  - dleeftink 1y ago
    Isn't it more a record about the state of computing than the state of conjecture?

lanyard-textile 1y ago

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 1y ago
> 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=43735397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735555 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=43736281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736558 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!
- 1y ago