US researchers have succeeded in solving a longer mathematical problem ever developed by a supercomputer . The answer to the Boolean problem of the Pythagorean triples , enunciated 35 years ago, is so long that a human being would take 10 billion years to read it.
With an incredible size of 200 terabytes – equivalent to all digitized texts held by the US Library of Congress – it is the largest mathematical proof ever produced, reports the CNRS, French national research center.
Marijn Heule, Oliver Kullmann and Victor Marek from the universities of Texas, Swansea and Kentucky, respectively, presented their work during the SAT 2016 international conference, which took place this weekend in Bordeaux. The calculations were obtained in the Stampede supercomputer of the University of Texas.
The question is whether each whole number of red or blue can be colored so that no terna are all of the same color. For example, with items 3, 4 and 5, the numbers 3 and 5 should be blue and the 4, red. It has been shown that there are 102,300 ways to color whole numbers up to 7,824, but once reached the figure 7.825 it is impossible to have multicolored ternas. However, the computer did not explain why.
