Recreating the Shortest Math Paper with Rust and WASM | Hacker News Reader

Recreating the Shortest Math Paper with Rust and WASM

carlkcarlk.github.io

44 pointskibwen11 comments

The original paper is shown here: https://paperpile.com/blog/shortest-papers/ , whose counterexample was computed on a CDC 6600 mainframe in 1966.

The source for this page can be found at https://github.com/CarlKCarlK/shortestpaper .

That's sweet. I wonder how long that CDC 6600 mainframe took to calculate it in 1966. My mobile phone's web browser did it in 4.54s.

I've tried looking, but have found no answer to that question.

For these sorts of geek culture stories, I usually expect to find some sort of back-story or context.

I like the discrepancy of technology presented in that counterexample. Euler definitely didn't Have that amount of computing power to just do a naive search,now we can even do those calculations on home computers

The actual content in the repository is just a few for loops to find the counterexample. With a ton of commented out code, and some default code generated by cargo I am guessing. I am not sure how ready the author was for people to view this.

https://github.com/CarlKCarlK/shortestpaper/blob/main/src/li...

The author submitted it to /r/rust a few hours before this submission: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/sf8mqp/recreating_wor...

Judging from that thread, they were posting it more for advice and comments on how to write Rust code better. It looks like a fun learning project!

This is not quite a fair comparison, as the example in Rust is hard-coded to find the fifth power. A more exhaustive search would need to also check 3rd and 4th powers.

Those need to look at sets of only three, respectively four integers. For the default n, that’s 200×200, respectively 200 times faster ⇒ I don’t think it makes much of a difference.

Also, the paper talks of “as the smallest instances in which four fifth powers sum to a fifth power”

I guess they also looked for sums of 4th powers, but didn’t find

  95800⁴ + 217519⁴ + 414560⁴ = 422481⁴

(Found on a connection machine in 1988) or any of the even larger ones.

For some reason 134 is the smallest upper limit for which it finds the counterexample...

Wow! Never knew Rust had nested loops!

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