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Arithmetica

A collaborative platform for computational math that democratizes data availability and computation.

Inspiration

In 1900, David Hilbert created a list of 23 mathematical problems he deemed the most important to mathematical advancement. After more than 100 years 11 of those problems remain unsolved. High quality mathematical research dating back to the 1600s is still restricted in a way that allows only the wealthy and university researchers access. Mathematicians rely on computation data to assist in solving mathematical proofs. From the data, mathematicians run queries and gain insight into the underlying principles that govern mathematics.

Mathematicians have long suffered from the lack of access to and verifiability of computational mathematics data. Access to data is often siloed, centrally located, restricted, and never resumable. Free, decentralized access to this data and the generation of this data is an important evolution and will help mathematicians prove more theorems

What it does

Arithmetica is a reusable platform to democratize the computation and data availability of computational math problems. Mathematicians are able to submit problems to be computed in a decentralized way by voluntary participants. The resulting data is not access restricted; it is shared freely with the public.

Similar distributed computing projects have existed such as Folding at Home, Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI), and PrimeCoin. Our platform is different by providing an aspect of reusability. If a mathematician has a problem they deem worthy of computation they can submit the problem for computation to the blockchain. Then altruistic volunteers join in the computation in the hopes of advancing the solution to the problem. No single individual owns the data. Arithmetica has created a shared chalkboard for participants to contribute to an open math problem. The data is published without restriction for any person to access from privileged individuals down to the most impoverished.

Arithmetica accomplishes that goal using Solidity smart contracts to track the validity of the code used to evaluate and assert the computation. The volunteers connect together in a peer to peer network facilitated by the IPFS Pubsub protocol. The volunteers are seamlessly connected to the network without the need to download any tools. The volunteer goes to the Arithmetica website using a Brave Browser with Metamask enabled and selects a problem they want to help solve. The volunteer’s idle processing power will immediately be put to work helping an altruistic cause.

How to Contribute

Prerequisites

Desktop & Mobile Browsers: Will work with: Brave, Chrome, Firefox

Note: Access to an Ethereum Node, or MetaMask is need to define new problems, but not required to contribute to existing ones.

Collatz Conjecture

Or follow these step by step instructions

  1. Navigate to: https://arithmetica.network/contribute

  2. Select a problem to contribute your computer’s resources to:

    Click Contribute

    arithmetica_contribue_1

    Select Problem

    arithmetica_contribue_2

  3. Watch you and your peers contribute to a good cause!

    arithmetica