Comment by Karliss
5 days ago
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.
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.
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
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
Yes but the person placing the spire doesn't claim to have built the largest skyscraper unless they also built the rest of the skyscraper.
Well, maybe they do on their resume.
I'm not sure this is in touch with reality, there are plenty of examples of companies who only poured the foundations of such buildings bragging about the entire thing.
1 reply →
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.
> Placing a penny on top of skyscraper
Great intuitive metaphor, btw.
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.
Good lord, man, you don't have to be that much of an asshole about it.