

Riecoin breaks world record for prime sextuplets, twice [pdf] - gatra
http://riecoin.org/Press%20release%202014-11-26.pdf

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gatra
Please learn from the project at riecoin.org Latest news: "Last week, Riecoin
– a project that doubles as decentralized virtual currency and a distributed
computing system - quietly broke the record for the largest prime number
sextuplet. This happened on November 17, 2014 at 19:50 GMT and the calculation
took only 70 minutes using the massive distributed computing power of its
network. This week the feat was outdone and the project beat its own record on
November 24, 2014 at 20:28 GMT achieving numbers 654 digits long, 21 more than
its previous record."

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brey
very neat. it's bothered me just how many GWh we've collectively poured into
bitcoins.

is this of any practical use (cryptography?), or is it for pure mathematical
interest?

(not saying the latter is inferior ...)

~~~
tacotime
I think the answer might be that for now it's mathematical interest but no one
really knows what it might or might not turn into. I think the more of these
sextuplet, twin etc. primes that we discover the closer it may be bringing us
to developing a grand theory of primes and solving difficult problems like the
twin prime conjecture and whatever else is out there. And if we could do that
then that would be where the practical ramifications would start to possibly
emerge. So for now I see it as just more data that might or might not help
spark something in the mind(s) of some mathematical genius(es) one day.

I am in no way an expert and this is just amateur speculation but I wanted to
write it anyways because I was (am) wondering the same thing.

~~~
xamuel
Mathematician here, have to disagree. Knowledge about individual primes (or
n-tuples) is pretty much useless for understanding the big picture of them.
And if things like "solving the twin prime conjecture" had practical
applications, we wouldn't need to solve them to reap them: if there's a
crypto-technique that hinges on TPC being true, you can start using it today,
and if it somehow breaks, congratulations, you disproved the conjecture.

~~~
wbhart
I absolutely agree with that. But there can be exceptions. For example the
ternary Goldbach conjecture boiled down in the end (after a lot of analytic
"pencil sharpening" as the author called it) to an exhaustive computer search
up to some limit.

Of course that was an exceptional case. There were some very committed
computational people who had been working on related stuff for years prior who
just happened to have the code that could just about reach the required limit
with sufficient hardware, which we just happened to have sitting around in
between working on projects paid for by our grant.

By the time the real theoretical work was done with pencil and paper, the
computational task was just completing, meaning the result could be stated
unconditionally.

Whether you would say that the computer search allowed us to learn anything
mathematically useful, though is a state of mind. Mathematicians care much
more about techniques than knowing large lists of otherwise random looking
numbers, even if conjectures about such lists do motivate looking for new
techniques, and even if there is some prestige in having established a long-
lived conjecture.

~~~
Someone
I would say that, for now, the statement

    
    
      *"any odd integer > 5 can be written as the sum of three primes"*
    

is at best a tiny bit better than the

N _" any odd integer > exp(3100) can be written as the sum of three primes"_

that we had before or even than the even weaker

    
    
      *"any sufficiently large odd integer can be written as the sum of three primes"*
    

That would change (for me) if we ever link that magical constant 5 to another
magic constant 5 in math, or if we create a series of related constants (sums
of 4 primes? Sums of three numbers of the form pq with p and q prime? Who
knows?) and show a pattern in them.

That, I think, is another good reason to try and pinpoint the exact values of
these limits. The values the,self are dull, but knowing them may give
mathematicians ideas about why they have the values they have. It may often be
(relatively) dumb work, but still worth doing.

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lappa
This scamcoin is uninteresting. Bitcoin has come up with the smallest sha2
hashes (which is also pretty uninteresting). The hope behind Riecoin is that
some breakthrough may come about for finding prime sextuplets. The hope for
Bitcoin is that no breakthrough will come about for finding small sha256
values.

Basically the purpose for Riecoins PoW is to be broken which doesn't make
invest from the perspective of someone using it as a currency.

~~~
lappa
s/invest/sense/

