The duo stored their program working within the background for over a decade. Throughout that point, a few computer systems from their ragtag assortment succumbed to overheating and even flames. “There was one that truly despatched out sparks,” Brittenham stated. “That was form of enjoyable.” (These machines, he added, had been “honorably retired.”)
Then, within the fall of 2024, a paper a few failed try to make use of machine studying to disprove the additivity conjecture caught Brittenham and Hermiller’s consideration. Maybe, they thought, machine studying wasn’t the perfect strategy for this specific downside: If a counterexample to the additivity conjecture was on the market, it could be “a needle in a haystack,” Hermiller stated. “That’s not fairly what issues like machine studying are about. They’re about looking for patterns in issues.”
Nevertheless it bolstered a suspicion the pair already had—that possibly their extra fastidiously honed sneakernet may discover the needle.
The Tie That Binds
Brittenham and Hermiller realized they might make use of the unknotting sequences they’d uncovered to search for potential counterexamples to the additivity conjecture.
Think about once more that you’ve two knots whose unknotting numbers are 2 and three, and also you’re attempting to unknot their join sum. After one crossing change, you get a brand new knot. If the additivity conjecture is to be believed, then the unique knot’s unknotting quantity needs to be 5, and this new knot’s needs to be 4.
However what if this new knot’s unknotting quantity is already recognized to be 3? That suggests that the unique knot could be untied in simply 4 steps, breaking the conjecture.
“We get these center knots,” Brittenham stated. “What can we study from them?”
He and Hermiller already had the proper instrument for the event buzzing away on their suite of laptops: the database they’d spent the earlier decade growing, with its higher bounds on the unknotting numbers of 1000’s of knots.
The mathematicians began so as to add pairs of knots and work by the unknotting sequences of their join sums. They centered on join sums whose unknotting numbers had solely been approximated within the loosest sense, with a giant hole between their highest and lowest attainable values. However that also left them with a large listing of knots to work by—“undoubtedly within the tens of tens of millions, and possibly within the lots of of tens of millions,” Brittenham stated.
For months, their pc program utilized crossing adjustments to those knots and in contrast the ensuing knots to these of their database. Someday in late spring, Brittenham checked this system’s output information, as he did most days, to see if something fascinating had turned up. To his nice shock, there was a line of textual content: “CONNECT SUM BROKEN.” It was a message he and Hermiller had coded into this system—however they’d by no means anticipated to really see it.
