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answered 8 years ago

dan_fulea gravatar image

The following code finds the two solutions in the range of natural numbers <1131 in a relatively quick manner.

def PossibilitiesMod( p, ordered=True ):
    """Compute all relevant (a,b,c,d) mod p
    """
    F = GF( p )
    powers = list( set( [ a^5 for a in F ] ) )

    possibilities = [ (a, b, c, d) 
                      for a in F for b in F for c in F for d in F
                      if a^5 + b^5 + c^5 + d^5 in powers ]
    if ordered:
        possibilities = [ (a, b, c, d) 
                          for (a, b, c, d) in possibilities
                          if a.lift() <= b.lift() <= c.lift() <= d.lift() ]
    possibilities.sort()
    return possibilities

p1 = 11      ; p2 = 31      ;
F1 = GF( p1 ); F2 = GF( p2 );

matchList1 = PossibilitiesMod( p1, ordered=False )
matchList2 = PossibilitiesMod( p2, ordered=True  )

lift_dic = {}
for x in [ 1 .. p1*p2 ]:
    lift_dic[ ( F1(x), F2(x) ) ] = x

fifthPowers = [ a^5 for a in range( 1, ( p1 * p2 *5^(1/5) ) .n() ) ]
solutions   = []

count = 0
for a1, b1, c1, d1 in matchList1:
    count += 1 
    if count % 1000 == 0:    print count
    for a2, b2, c2, d2 in matchList2:

        a = lift_dic[ ( a1, a2 ) ]
        b = lift_dic[ ( b1, b2 ) ]
        c = lift_dic[ ( c1, c2 ) ]
        d = lift_dic[ ( d1, d2 ) ]

        if a^5 + b^5 + c^5 + d^5 in fifthPowers:
            print "\n\n\n!!! SOLUTION !!! ( %s , %s , %s , %s )\n\n\n" % ( a, b, c, d )
            solutions.append( (a,b,c,d) )

Namely:

( 220 , 168 , 266 , 54 )
( 133 , 110 , 84 , 27 )

The last one is of course:

Lander and Parkin, 1966, "a direct search on the CDC 6600..."

(The first solution above is "twice the second one". Sorry.) To have a feasible search we have restricted first to relevant matches modulo some prime numbers, in our case 11 and 31. (Chosen so that the Euler indicator function on them delivers multiples of 5, the power appearing in the equation.)

For the other related problems with higher powers this is of course too naive and slow...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_sum_of_powers_conjecture

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~rizos/EqualSums/equalsums.html

http://euler.free.fr/index.htm

(I'm afraid, this answers an other question, not explicitly the one posted above. The "no-if-restriction" is in m.h.o. a good joke, i've got the same feeling as facing "show this inequality without using algebra" some decades ago.)