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Comment by throwaway150 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> Never heard anyone calling these world records, before today.

You've never heard of the world record for calculating digits of pi?

https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/mathematics/...

That's not comparable to finding Goldbach NON-counterexamples.

With Goldbach, claiming a "world record" just means checking one more number and seeing if it is still NOT a counterexample. It's easy. Contrast that with computing a new digit of pi - something you can't achieve by simply incrementing a value and running a check.

Finding each new digit of pi (the ones very far out) is not a trivial task. The computational effort increases by a lot as you go deeper. Something like O(n (log n)^k) for some k (usually k = 3).

Every second is easy. Let's aim for new world records at a 1MHz rate.

Since this is math, I feel pedantic. It may not be a notable world record, but it’s still a world record. There are infinitely many non-notable world record categories. I currently hold the one for saying the word “fbejsixbenebxhsh” the most number of times in a row. Nobody cares, but it’s still a world record.

Since it's not just math but also using English on a social website, we can be even more pedantic and observe that posting it implies notability. It is literally noting it.

Isn't it more a record about the state of computing than the state of conjecture?

This is more like if someone pulled a truck down 2,800 miles of road between NYC and LA in 2012, left it there, and then you grabbed the rope in 2025 to pull it less than another tenth of a mile to have "shatters world record" in your blog title.

I.e. not only is this an extremely small increment but the original work did not have to be repeated. Nothing about the state of computing in 2012 would have prevented going the extra amount here, they just decided to stop. The original record even states (on https://sweet.ua.pt/tos/goldbach.html):

> On a single core of a 3.3GHz core i3 processor, testing an interval of 10^12 integers near 10^18 takes close to 48 minutes

So the additional work here in 2025 was the equivalent of running a single core of a 2012 i3 for ~70 more hours.

All this is a shame as the project itself actually seems much more interesting than leading claims.

It’s not a notable world record, but it’s still a world record, if we’re being pedantic. And math is pedantic.

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.

> 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.

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