Yesterday, Intel lost the bid for the patent assets of defunct Canadian company Nortel, despite joining forces with Google.<\/p>\n
Google bid some odd amounts<\/a>; for instance, at one point they bid $1,902,160,540.<\/p>\n The digits happen to be those of Brun’s constant<\/a>: B2 = 1.90216058…<\/p>\n Brun’s constant is the sum of the reciprocals of twin primes. B2 = (1\/3 + 1\/5) + (1\/5 + 1\/7) + (1\/11 + 1\/13) + … According to Brun’s theorem, this sum converges. The limit of the sum is Brun’s constant.<\/p>\n A professor of mathematics named Thomas Nicely once used a group of computers to calculate twin primes up to 1e14, computing Brun’s constant among other things.<\/p>\n At one point, Nicely’s computations failed. After eliminating other sources of error, Nicely concluded that the problem was a fault in the new Pentium processors<\/a> present in some recently acquired computers in the group.<\/p>\n Nicely notified Intel, but it wasn’t until after a public relations disaster that Intel finally responded the way they should have in the first place, offering to replace all affected processors. This cost Intel $475 million.<\/p>\n Who knows, if they still had that extra $475 million cash in their pockets, they could have bid more and won yesterday.<\/p>\n Yesterday, Intel lost the bid for the patent assets of defunct Canadian company Nortel, despite joining forces with Google. Google bid some odd amounts; for instance, at one point they bid $1,902,160,540. The digits happen to be those of Brun’s constant: B2 = 1.90216058… Brun’s constant is the sum of the reciprocals of twin primes. […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,11,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commerce","category-computers","category-mathematics","category-46-id","category-11-id","category-30-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2155"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12437,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155\/revisions\/12437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}