An efficient algorithm for the computation of Bernoulli numbers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Bernoulli numbers B_k are a sequence of rational numbers that is ubiquitous in mathematics, but difficult to compute efficiently (compared to e.g. approximating π). In 2008, Harvey gave the currently fastest known practical way for computing them: his algorithm computes B_k mod p in time O(p log^{1 + o(1)} p). By doing this for O(k) many small primes p in parallel and then combining the results with the Chinese Remainder Theorem, one recovers the value of B_k as a rational number in O(k² log^{2 + o(1)} k) time. One advantage of this approach is that the expensive part of the algorithm is highly parallelisable and has very low memory requirements. This algorithm still holds the world record with its computation of B_{10⁸}. We give a verified efficient LLVM implementation of this algorithm. This was achieved by formalising the necessary mathematical background theory in Isabelle/HOL, proving an abstract version of the algorithm correct, and refining this abstract version down to LLVM using Lammich’s Isabelle-LLVM framework, including many low-level optimisations. The performance of the resulting LLVM code is comparable with Harvey’s original unverified and hand-optimised C++ implementation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".