PeterisP comments on The dangers of zero and one - Less Wrong

27 Post author: PhilGoetz 21 November 2013 12:21PM

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Comment author: PeterisP 23 November 2013 06:01:30AM 1 point [-]

Well, but you can (a) preform moderately extensive testing, and (b) do redundancy.

If you write 3 programs for verifying primeness (using different algorithms and possibly programming languages/approaches); and if all their results match, then you can assume a much higher confidence in correctness than for a single such program.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 15 January 2014 01:52:00PM 0 points [-]

I think multiple programs wouldn't help very much unless they were run on different processors and written in different languages.

Comment author: dankane 30 November 2013 07:28:59AM 0 points [-]

Yes. I agree. I am certainly not trying to say that 99.99% confidence in the primality status of a four digit number is not achievable.