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Number Research Inc

numberresearch.xyz

55 pointseieio20 comments

67 has been searched 13k+ times, more than 69 and 420 combined

Times are changing

Oh lord I feel old, I couldn't figure out why 67 was special until I read this.

Not according to https://numberresearch.xyz/info

    most searched:

    69 29504 searches
    67 13640 searches

edit: ...presumably due to the HN effect, 69 has jumped up to ~33k while 67 stagnates at ~13k!

I'm not sure whether I'm taking too seriously something intended as a joke, but this in fact can conceivably be useful! When studying mathematical problems, sometimes you have a number that has some special meaning in your problem (e.g., the first value for which some phenomenon does not occur), you may be able to compute this number by brute-force or by ad-hoc reasoning, and if the number is high enough then someone else finding this number may mean that they are looking at the same problem as you. Since there's a canonical way to write numbers, but not a canonical way to define problems, then this can be helpful for these people to find each other.

An example of a similar phenomenon here https://a3nm.net/work/research/questions/#words-without-shuf... where someone interested in the sequence "abcacbacabc" is plausibly looking at the longest and lexicographically smallest ternary word without a shuffle square substring. Just searching for "abcacbacabc" on Google yields papers who look at this -- and two people independently coming up with the concept could find each other in this way if they write examples the same way even if they don't use the same words to define the concept.

(A related resource in maths is the OEIS https://oeis.org/ to see whether the integer sequence you came up with has already been studied or has another non-obvious reformulation.)

A more general approach are Encyclopedias of integer series. I think that works better than just focusing on single numbers. Hm. How many numbers are there, that are interesting, but not part of a series?

Some of the most searched numbers are surprising. Why are 8487798767697884826576, 119104105114108, or even 3551 so high up the list?

See most searched here: https://numberresearch.xyz/info

All of us use the same keyboards more or less, maybe us randomly typing a large number is not as random as we would like to think. Just like how “asdf”, “xcyb” are common strings because these keys are together, there has to be some pattern here as well.

Especially for those very large numbers in the top ten (like 166884362531608099236779 with 6779 searches), and the relatively small number of total "votes" (probably less than a million), I think the only likely explanation for their rank is ballot-stuffing.

That means there is less entropy than purely random strings, not that this specific number would be so far outside the distribution. My money would be on someone hammering it.

That's Numberwang!

Are they finding the numbers least likely to be used on lottery tickets?

I found three new numbers!

It seems that someone sequentially ran up to around 131k (at the moment), I can't get any lower new number. Also please restore the input when a database error occurs...

Do we get digital stickers for the numbers we found? ;)

Well I can tell there are at least 2 other people crawling every number incrementally... Numberwang!

Oddly, “7070” seems to always return a Database Error for me. Other numbers work fine.

Interesting: 1729 gave me a Database Error the first time, then came back with 34 previous searches

The time it takes for the server to check whether the number exists is too long imo.

How high can the numbers go?

10^10000 - 1 is the largest allowed number.

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