@vzn so you use ruby? I didn't read all of data about Collatz, extremely many experiments. But seriously ever considered writting cycle characteristic? Partitioning numbers to consider only not excluded cases? Trying to check more numbers than already have been checked? After experiments what is your conjecture about result? And when you are going to prove it? (the last one is serious question)
@EvilJS have tried many novel ideas not tried anywhere else & made some "dents" in the problem. have written up some conclusions in some blogs. a brief summary: every trajectory is unique like a snowflake. the problem is inherently fractal. it has similarities to the mandelbrot set. so the problem of proof is one of theorem proving, which comes down to induction, and if there is an inductive proof, it would presumably not look like any before seen.
sometimes it seems possible the conjecture could in some weird sense be both "true and unprovable"...
think looking for counterexamples is not a worthless activity & probably several papers have been written on exactly that.
collatz, somewhat like the mandelbrot set, is like an entire universe packed into a small eqn.
with seemingly endless/ near/ maybe "fully" infinite variety.
@EvilJS lol "proofs in psychology are stricter than math". as for data mining/ big data, it is field independent/ agnostic. it is like a "wave" or "paradigm shift" penetrating/ crosscutting all scientific fields.
Not comparable at decent level, but strict is not about logic - when science was very young there was only one called philosophy. Math and Psy took logic and proving apparatus from philosophy reasoning. Psy is using math, logic, statistics, created own statistics division, but went step further in meta analysis of created tools.
And there came strict derivation constraint, directional hypothesis beforehand any experimentation. In constant fear of making mistakes. So any data mining is forbidden, lack of derivation from theories or earlier results (like Collatz, it goes back to what is proven) makes your work flawed. Anything accidentally discovered must go all the road.
So "stricter" was about hard work to provide it and workaround.
And if something is not connected, well this is sad, but it sticks to correlation results, and long road and effort it will take to became approved.
Take it as lemma, that later become theorems. Here is a bit like you have got discovery, proof, repetability in all situations, and this is treated like conjecture ;)
So basically there some well theorems, like about brain cells scalability and activation. It was shown that it applies to every brainhaving creature. But no, I am not elevating this to say it is better or pure or canonical, it would be nonsensical as they use same reasoning and tools, and moreover math deals with abstract ideals and psy with everchanging complex structures in chaos of noise. Sorry wrote this because when I read once more it really sounded akward.
@EvilJS collatz? have tried some experiments that relate to other bases however base 2 seems to be especially relevant. re photosynthesis, what are you talking about?
@vzn you gave link how to attract girls to computer science, I clicked and there was article about photosynthesis. Kinda weird. I had easier method, like persuasion, always worked ;)
"Supercomputers enlisted to shed light on photosynthesis" there are no girls :/
@vzn yup, Collatz, it is high time to solve it. I would try but for now I am trying methods that Raphael gave on prunning tree. For now it works, but still have to test overnight fluctuations.
"To get girls more interested in computer science, make classrooms less 'geeky' / sciencedaily" this link you provided here?
