A long time ago I heard about a funny paradox. The paradox was about the lowest integer number that was not special in any way. “Special numbers” were defined by certain rules. Even numbers were special, so were prime numbers, any multiple of 5, 2 in any power and any number with two digits alike. There may have been a few more, but they all made sense in the way that the numbers they defined somehow “felt” special.
Finally, the lowest number that was not special, is of course special for the very reason that it was the lowest number that was not special, so in turn we would have to look for another number that would be the lowest number that was not special and so on ad infinitum.
I don’t remember the source of this paradox, but I’m going to suggest another similar one. What is the lowest integer number that can not be found with Google? When you find one, you must post it on the web (e.g. in a comment to this post). It will then be indexed on Google and is no longer the lowest number that can not be found on Google, so that the hunt continues.
If you post the number somewhere else on the web, please post a comment here anyway to help others keep track of the current lowest number.
Below is a graph of the number of occurrences Google finds each integer from 1 to 100. We could call this the “significance index” of the number. The least significant number between 1 and 100 is 87, with “only” 27 million occurrences.
The goal of the game is to find the first number with the significance index of zero. I’ve found one manually, but I doubt it is the lowest one: 9,483,287. Judging from the trends in my random manual searches, I guess that the lowest number might be found somewhere around 2,000,000.
Now to perform the search, don’t write anything that Google might see as a denial-of-service attack – please. This is just supposed to be an innocent game.
So, do you think we should patent the lowest number? I mean obviously there is no prior art if it is not found with Google, right?