I just researched a little bit about the Goldbach Conjecture, and from what I found, it has been proven up to the number 400 trillion. Obviously this was done by a computer, which I assume was computing at a rate unfathomable by a human. Who decided where to stop? Did the programmer explicitly tell the program to stop at 400 trillion? Did an intern sit there and watch a counter go up and up and up until they decided exactly 400 trillion is enough? Is 400 trillion a natural point of some kind of difficulty in calculation? Who comes up with the stopping point? It's seriously bothering me now that I think about it that they could have just let the computer run for a little bit longer and got an extra digit. They could have let the computer just keep running indefinitely and have a LOT more digits.
Before anyone asks, no I don't know what I'm talking about. I'd like to consider myself to be smart, but this is well outside of my area of expertise, and I'm just curious, so don't berate me over not knowing advanced mathematics. Algebra is where I stopped.
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from math https://ift.tt/2NkBZpp
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