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posted by
janrinok
on Sunday March 02 2014, @08:30PM
from the keeping-geeks-and-mathematicians-happy dept.
from the keeping-geeks-and-mathematicians-happy dept.
KritonK writes:
Ed's Note: For those not sure what an optimal Golomb ruler is, or how you would use one, see here.
"Following the recent start of the OGR-28 project, the search for the optimal Golomb ruler with 28 marks, distributed.net quietly announced the completion of project OGR-27 on February 25. The shortest Golomb ruler with 27 marks has length 553 and marks at positions 0 3 15 41 66 95 97 106 142 152 220 221 225 242 295 330 338 354 382 388 402 415 486 504 523 546 553. This confirms that the best known, up to now, Golomb ruler was optimal. When the project began, it was expected that a shorter ruler would be found, but this did not happen."
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The OGR-27 Project Has Been Completed
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I don't want a pickle,
I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.
And I don't want to die,
I just want to ride on my motorcy.
Cle.
-- Arlo Guthrie
(Score: 1) by rev_irreverence on Sunday March 02 2014, @10:56PM
Distributed.net's Optimal Golomb Ruler projects first started in February 2000 with the search for a more optimal 24 mark ruler (OGR-24). Since then they have exhaustively searched for a more optimal 25, 26, and 27 mark ruler. It took 14yrs of searching to complete those projects and they have just started the search for a 28 mark ruler.
In those 14 years not a single project has successfully found a "more" optimal ruler than what was previously known. Rather they have just managed to confirm that the previously known shortest ruler is already the "most" optimal.
Seems like a massive expenditure of CPU cycles for not a lot of results. I have been participating in these projects for over a decade, but I am seriously reconsidering getting involved in OGR-28.
Any ideas for other distributed computing projects?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by guises on Monday March 03 2014, @04:50AM
Well there's always Folding@Home, and it's had some successes, but all of these projects are doing basic research, and if you're looking for exciting results, basic research is not where you'll find them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @05:59AM
Well the OGR project at least adds something (however small) to our knowledge. Compare that to dnet's RC5 projects. (And think of all the electricity used to mine bitcoins...)
(Score: 2, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Monday March 03 2014, @07:39AM
Folding@home. While I can appreciate the pure mathematics of Golomb Rulers, I'd think that contributing to the advancement of medical science might be more useful in the long run.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @06:42PM
A quick search would have found this