PeterisP comments on The dangers of zero and one - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (68)
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.
I think multiple programs wouldn't help very much unless they were run on different processors and written in different languages.
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.