A team led by Andrew Sutherland of MIT and Andrew Booker of

Bristol University has solved the final piece of a famous 65-year old

math puzzle with an answer for the most elusive number of all: 42.

The number 42 is especially significant to fans of science fiction

novelist Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,”

because that number is the answer given by a supercomputer to “the

Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

Booker also wanted to know the answer to 42. That is, are there three

cubes whose sum is 42?

This sum of three cubes puzzle, first set in 1954 at the University of

Cambridge and known as the Diophantine Equation x3+y3+z3=k,

challenged mathematicians to find solutions for numbers 1-100. With

smaller numbers, this type of equation is easier to solve: for example,

29 could be written as 33 + 13 + 13, while 32 is unsolvable. All were

eventually solved, or proved unsolvable, using various techniques and

supercomputers, except for two numbers: 33 and 42.

Booker devised an ingenious algorithm and spent weeks on his

university’s supercomputer when he recently came up with a solution

for 33. But when he turned to solve for 42, Booker found that the

computing needed was an order of magnitude higher and might be

beyond his supercomputer’s capability. Booker says he received many

offers of help to find the answer, but instead he turned to his friend

Andrew "Drew" Sutherland, a principal research scientist in the

Department of Mathematics. “He’s a world’s expert at this sort of

thing,” Booker says.

Sutherland, whose specialty includes massively parallel computations,

broke the record in 2017 for the largest Compute Engine cluster, with

580,000 cores on Preemptible Virtual Machines, the largest known

high-performance computing cluster to run in the public cloud.

Like other computational number theorists who work in arithmetic

geometry, he was aware of the “sum of three cubes” problem. And the

two had worked together before, helping to build the L-functions and

Modular Forms Database (LMFDB), an online atlas of mathematical

objects related to what is known as the Langlands Program. “I was

thrilled when Andy asked me to join him on this project,” says

Sutherland.
Booker and Sutherland discussed the algorithmic strategy to be used

in the search for a solution to 42. As Booker found with his solution to

33, they knew they didn’t have to resort to trying all of the possibilities

for x, y, and z.

“There is a single integer parameter, d, that determines a relatively

small set of possibilities for x, y, and z such that the absolute value of

z is below a chosen search bound B,” says Sutherland. “One then

enumerates values for d and checks each of the possible x, y, z

associated to d. In the attempt to crack 33, the search bound B was

1016, but this B turned out to be too small to crack 42; we instead

used B = 1017 (1017 is 100 million billion).

Otherwise, the main difference between the search for 33 and the

search for 42 would be the size of the search and the computer

platform used. Thanks to a generous offer from UK-based Charity

Engine, Booker and Sutherland were able to tap into the computing

power from over 400,000 volunteers’ home PCs, all around the world,

each of which was assigned a range of values for d. The computation

on each PC runs in the background so the owner can still use their PC

for other tasks.

Sutherland is also a fan of Douglas Adams, so the project was

irresistible.

The method of using Charity Engine is similar to part of the plot

surrounding the number 42 in the "Hitchhiker" novel: After Deep

Thought’s answer of 42 proves unsatisfying to the scientists, who

don’t know the question it is meant to answer, the supercomputer

decides to compute the Ultimate Question by building a

supercomputer powered by Earth … in other words, employing a

worldwide massively parallel computation platform.

“This is another reason I really liked running this computation on

Charity Engine — we actually did use a planetary-scale computer to

settle a longstanding open question whose answer is 42.”

They ran a number of computations at a lower capacity to test both

their code and the Charity Engine network. They then used a number

of optimizations and adaptations to make the code better suited for a

massively distributed computation, compared to a computation run on

a single supercomputer, says Sutherland.

Why couldn't Bristol's supercomputer solve this problem?

“Well, any computer *can* solve the problem, provided you are willing

to wait long enough, but with roughly half a million PCs working on the

problem in parallel (each with multiple cores), we were able to

complete the computation much more quickly than we could have

using the Bristol machine (or any of the machines here at MIT),” says

Sutherland.

Using the Charity Engine network is also more energy-efficient. “For

the most part, we are using computational resources that would

otherwise go to waste,” says Sutherland. “When you're sitting at your

computer reading an email or working on a spreadsheet, you are

using only a tiny fraction of the CPU resource available, and the

Charity Engine application, which is based on the Berkeley Open

Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), takes advantage of

this. As a result, the carbon footprint of this computation — related to

the electricity our computations caused the PCs in the network to use

above and beyond what they would have used, in any case — is lower

than it would have been if we had used a supercomputer.”

Sutherland and Booker ran the computations over several months, but

the final successful run was completed in just a few weeks. When the
email from Charity Engine arrived, it provided the first solution to

x3+y3+z3=42:

42 = (-80538738812075974)^3 + 80435758145817515^3 +

12602123297335631^3

“When I heard the news, it was definitely a fist-pump moment,” says

Sutherland. “With these large-scale computations you pour a lot of

time and energy into optimizing the implementation, tweaking the

parameters, and then testing and retesting the code over weeks and

months, never really knowing if all the effort is going to pay off, so it is

extremely satisfying when it does.”

Booker and Sutherland say there are 10 more numbers, from

101-1000, left to be solved, with the next number being 114.

But both are more interested in a simpler but computationally more

challenging puzzle: whether there are more answers for the sum of

three cubes for 3.

“There are four very easy solutions that were known to the

mathematician Louis J. Mordell, who famously wrote in 1953, ‘I do not

know anything about the integer solutions of x3 + y3 + z3 = 3 beyond

the existence of the four triples (1, 1, 1), (4, 4, -5), (4, -5, 4), (-5, 4, 4);

and it must be very difficult indeed to find out anything about any other

solutions.’ This quote motivated a lot of the interest in the sum of three

cubes problem, and the case k=3 in particular. While it is conjectured

that there should be infinitely many solutions, despite more than 65

years of searching we know only the easy solutions that were already

known to Mordell. It would be very exciting to find another solution for

k=3.”