English

Schur Number Five

Logic in Computer Science 2017-11-23 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

We present the solution of a century-old problem known as Schur Number Five: What is the largest (natural) number nn such that there exists a five-coloring of the positive numbers up to nn without a monochromatic solution of the equation a+b=ca + b = c? We obtained the solution, n=160n = 160, by encoding the problem into propositional logic and applying massively parallel satisfiability solving techniques on the resulting formula. We constructed and validated a proof of the solution to increase trust in the correctness of the multi-CPU-year computations. The proof is two petabytes in size and was certified using a formally verified proof checker, demonstrating that any result by satisfiability solvers---no matter how large---can now be validated using highly trustworthy systems.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.08076,
  title  = {Schur Number Five},
  author = {Marijn J. H. Heule},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.08076},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

accepted by AAAI 2018

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:53:25.138Z