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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

The sum-of-three cubes announcement was tweeted pretty easily.

https://twitter.com/robinhouston/status/1169877007045296128

Its easier to drum up support for your paper when you have a quick way to prove to the community of mathematicians that your results are golden.

EDIT: The original webpage: http://math.mit.edu/~drew/sumsofcubes.html

As you can see, the sum-of-cubes announcements are very terse. Ultimately pointing to the following link: https://share.cocalc.com/share/900eec7e-0710-4e2f-a03a-dba01...

That kind of website / tweet is a "drop the mic" moment. It really makes people pay attention.

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So this is why I’ve suddenly been getting new interaction on that old tweet! I’m glad I saw this comment, because I was quite confused.

That's not how science works. Yes, if your algorithm is simple enough and you can create an implementation, then it is good that you produce a working version. But it may be more complicated to implement the algorithm than writing a paper. This doesn't mean that the implementation is impossible.

That's exactly how maths works, specifically in the cases where where the claim is easily backed by a demonstration. A famous example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Nelson_Cole

If you 'destroyed RSA' through better factorization, all you have to do is start publishing factors of RSA challenge numbers.

Matthew Green has a fun thread about other ways to approach this along with an interesting "real talk about factoring" sidebar by Nadia Heninger:

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/13669500931784990...

> That's not how science works.

This isn't science, it's math. As the article mentions, there is an 862-bit RSA challenge that hasn't been factored yet. Factoring it should be possible on commodity hardware if the claims in the paper are true. So why not just do it? The test of success is simple: either you win the challenge or you don't.

For a skilled researcher it may be an order of magnitude easier to write the whitepapar than to code the implementation.

There are example factorizations around page 11 if I'm reading this correctly. Haven't run them through yet because I'm refreshing my atrophied linear algebra knowledge and walking through some of the source papers, so some work is in there.

> But it may be more complicated to implement the algorithm than writing a paper

Then why would I trust it? You don't need to write code, you need to write an example

As Linus Torvalds says: talk is cheap, show me the code

Academia is full of "paper scientists" that put out papers but produce nothing of value.

They are also full of postgraduate students as well that would be more than willing to work together and put a proof-of-concept code with the paper.

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