From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 18:32:51 MDT
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> > (spike66 <spike66@attbi.com>):
> > >
> > >Thus spake the keyboard of <spike66@attbi.com>:
> > >...We could snag the record! Who knows,
> > >|perhaps we could discover the illusive odd perfect
> > >|number.
> > >
> > >KPJ wrote: Good numbers... >yawn<
> > >
> > >How _BAD_ can odd numbers become?
> > >
> > >Maybe you should instead search for the most Evil Number?
> > >
> > Good idea. I have one whose goodness ratio is greater than 1.3. Of course
> > the primes would have a ratio of 1/P, the way I have defined goodness
> > ratio. That is an interesting question however. spike
>
> That 1/P approaches zero as the primes go larger, and since it's easy
> to prove that there is no largest prime, it follows that there is no
> limit to evil, and that record evil numbers are already being searched
> for adequately by GIMPS. I'll go back to protein folding now.
Well, if 1/P won't work as a definition of Evil on account of being too
uninteresting, we could define "evil" as some combination of the sum of a
number's divisors and the number of those divisors, such that numbers which
have more divisors are more evil. Or alternatively, we could take a first
stab at defining Evil as:
1) For a number which has a goodness ratio less than 1, evil is the
reciprocal of the goodness ratio multiplied by the number of divisiors;
2) For a number which has a goodness ratio greater than 1, evil is the
goodness ratio divided by the number of divisors.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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