ECCp-109 Solved 290
Daerk writes "ECCp-109 has been solved. A week ago. Now wonder my stats haven't updated. Now what am I going to do till climateprediction.net goes live..."
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ECCp-109 Solved
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"How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars." -- Steve Martin
What will you do? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What will you do? (Score:5, Interesting)
find the 40th Mersenne Prime [mersenne.org]
Re:What will you do? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What will you do? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What will you do? (Score:4, Interesting)
I dropped SETI and started doing Folding because I think it will be more directly relevant sooner. It'd be neat to find signals from another civilization, but I'm more interested in learning the details of how the fanstically intricate machine that is a human being works so we can do a better job of fixing it.
YOU FOOL! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:YOU FOOL! (Score:5, Funny)
Except, then they'll also start consuming us for food. That's another often overlooked disadvantage of SETI.
Re:YOU FOOL! (Score:4, Funny)
Except, then they'll also start consuming us for food. That's another often overlooked disadvantage of SETI.
+1 ***INFORMATIVE***?!?!?!
WTF?!?!?!
+1 Funny, sure. +1 Interesting, maybe. Hell, I'll even buy +1 Insightful when I'm on Nyquil, but +1 INFORMATIVE?!?! Who's moderating today -- Art Bell?
Re:YOU FOOL! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:YOU FOOL! (Score:4, Funny)
Time will tell.
Re:What will you do? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What will you do? (Score:2, Funny)
can't get my team and user stats since
2 days, because of the increase in traffic
and users!!!!
neeed.. know... user/team... stats
seriously though:
good to see they are getting tons of new
users lately
ars (Score:5, Insightful)
You guys here at
We ought to get the people here behind some distributed computing project. I bet we could beat any other team.
Re:ars (Score:4, Funny)
And if we can't....well, we will show impressed we are by posting a link to their website hehehe....
Re:ars (Score:5, Insightful)
Even better yet... (Score:2)
Why not lobby for distributed and P2P features right in the Linux kernel itself?
Scenario:
You install the now-getting-more-user-friendly Linux distro of the month on Grandma's PC. During installation, you are prompted to "use this PC's free time for GNU distributed/p2p assistance?". After answering affirmatively, you can then select a worthy cause such as protein folding or even delegate access to a centralized Linux group who could then use it for open-source fundraising / what not.
The P2P thing is a whole 'nother mess but I suppose that if someone implemented P2P sharing/mirroring on an open source level and then created an approval procedure required to (legally) have a file submission mass-mirrored to millons of PCs world-wide.
There is money in there somewhere...
Re:Even better yet... (Score:2)
Woah, hold on a second
That aside, I like the idea. Anyone here have any clout within the major distros? It should pretty much just be a matter of adding the relevant program to the distribution
Re:ars (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ars (Score:3, Funny)
We have... it's called "DOS-a-server-randomly", and we solve that problem several times daily.
q:]
MadCow.
What I'm gonna do (Score:4, Funny)
Figure out what the hell an ECCp-109 is?
Re:What I'm gonna do (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What I'm gonna do (Score:2)
Re:What I'm gonna do (Score:2)
Figure out what the hell an ECCp-109 is?
You'll probably have better luck reading the complete works of Shakespeare while waiting for your coffee to perk.
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Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
You don't know how much this has been keeping me up.
None of you know.
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Funny)
we WILL know.
OGR 25 (Score:5, Informative)
Counter thread (Score:2, Interesting)
Post your value and we'll measure the slashdot effect.
What are you going to do? Beat cancer! (Score:5, Informative)
I will admit there's some irony in my being a member of the alt.smokers.pipes team for this though :)
Cancer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cancer? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cancer? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's simply that nobody thinks in terms of
prevention and roots/causes of illness,but
only in terms of cures, symptoms relief...
So all the money available is being
channeled to cure research and none to
cause/prevention research.
(herbizides/pestizides/heavy metals/...
nutrition and the like in the case of cancer)
Re:Cancer? (Score:5, Interesting)
Another datapoint. I used to date an Otolaryngologist (ears, nose, and throat) who worked at NIH (a (the?) main US national medical center).
In normal conversation, she would talk about the large number of cancer patients she had and how hard it was for them to stop smoking or drinking alcohol even after they were diagnosed.
One day, curious, I asked how many cancer patients she had over the years that didn't smoke, drink, or both. 30 seconds went by. A frown developed on her face. "I think, maybe, two over the past 10 years. One I know was the wife of a smoker." She went on to explain that most were both alcoholics and 1+ pack a day smokers, though nearly all the rest were either heavy smokers or drinkers.
While cancer treatment and diagnosis wasn't her primary responsibility, it was a large part of the practice's business and (when money was available) research. Other problems they encountered were related to smoking -- especially cronic childhood ear/throat infections where one or both of the parents were heavy smokers.
Take it for what it's worth. Me, I love going out with friends for a good beer or two (quality over quantity) and snacks. Her observations keep me out of the smokey bar area, though.
Re:Cancer? (Score:5, Insightful)
These things obviously decrease the risk, but I believe that you can't eliminate the risk of cancer via environmental factors entirely. Cancer is one of those "shit happens" things about life. Our bodies aren't perfect, cancer is really a product of this fact.
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
My point being, you can get cancer through no fault of your own, BUT don't expect any sympathies when you develop throat cancer after 5 years of going through 2 packs a day.
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
I am not a biologist, so I'm just wondering out loud here, but maybe someone can answer this for me:
I presume that cancer is often just one of those "shit happens" things about life. That eventually your body will break down and do something it shouldn't do - like create a malignant tumor. But since we know that smoking leads to much higher incidences of cancer, do we know how much general environmental pollution leads to cancer? I read a couple years ago that certain cancer rates had increased in the US quite a lot during the past thirty years. Now, one possibility is that people aren't dying young of infections any more, so instead they're dying old of cancer. But another thought that crossed my mind is that simply this is what happens when a generation that has grown up with lots of smog, polluted rivers, etc., grows up. And that likewise, as we lower pollution, we'll see cancer rates decline again.
Therefore, we would expect to see cancer rates increase in China and India soon, but decline in the Western world as it cleans itself up.
Anyway, just wondering if someone can fill me in on how much scientists attribute cancer development to environmental pollution. Thanks!
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
She's been this way for over 40 years, you tell me that cancer is only brought on by these things you mention.. and I'll tell you that I don't beleive you.
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
Ask her how many of her patients she knew over the years that never ate food. I bet she would have to think a lot harder. The clear conclusion is that food causes cancer!
I'm not saying there isn't a correlation, or even possibly causation.. but it's very easy to slip in post hoc ergo prompter hoc type arguments with this stuff.
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
Thank you!
And we really know that it's cells that cause cancer :-)
But only on Tuesday -- hey, if cancer starts at some point, why not Tuesdays?
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
Also, this is not a philosophical argument. It's not even a scientific statement of any riggor and was not asserted to be so.
Read people, please. The complaints here are meaningless in context.
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
I see articles all the time about how eating this (broccoli, certain types of fish, etc.) or doing this (exercising, meditation, etc.) will cure, or at least lower significantly your chance of dying of cancer. And believe me, there are plenty of cancer patients and cancer clinics out there that are trying alternative methods, either for patients who don't trust drugs or who are already past help by standard treatments, whatever.
But the fact is, none of them work. If I found out tomorrow that eating vegetables was all it took to not get cancer, I would become a vegetarian. But you know what? There are plenty of vegetarians out there who have cancer.
Now, it is possible that various lifestyle choices can impact your odds of getting cancer/surviving cancer - that is very reasonable to believe. Of course, no one would be surrpised if people with balanced diets who exercised a lot survive cancer more often. But there is no simple cure for cancer like "just eat cabbage." To think that there is - and that it's just those evil public and private research institutions keeping such a cure private because they want to keep their jobs - is foolish paranoia.
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
Re:Cancer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cancer? (Score:2)
or join the God existence proof seekers (Score:5, Funny)
Note that once we make contact with God, He can cure cancer for us, factor larger integers, or tell us where the aliens are, so this distributed computing project subsumes every other one.
God is busy (Score:5, Funny)
Later on he goes to tryouts for the goatse.cx cover model, sponsored by the Federal Bad Guy Rehab Prison.
Yea, I'm going to hell for that one.
Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer! (Score:5, Funny)
*mumbles something about installing Windows would be spreading cancer*
Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer! (Score:2, Insightful)
Not sure what OS you are using, but if it's Linux or MacOS, folding is a go for you. See the
client download page [stanford.edu]. Studying protein folding is maybe not as directly aimed at curing diseases as Cure Cancer@Home, but odds are that if we understand folding better, a good antibody or two (or more efficient means of looking for them) will spring off.
Alex
Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer! (Score:2, Interesting)
Who owns the results of UD projects, though? I'm not donating processor cycles so that some multinational can patent the cure for cancer.
Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer! (Score:5, Interesting)
Fine. I'll consider it, so long as any research benefitting from my donation signs a legally binding agreement not to patent the resulting cure (if any), or any other useful knowledged gleaned from our 'donations.'
What, you say no way? Then this isn't a charity, it is just another profiteering company looking for a free handout, and playing people's heartstrings to get it.
Most of the patented pharmaceuticals have significant contributions of public funds (taxes) as well as private donations (charities), which they then patent and sell back to the very people who helped underwrite their research at often unaffordable monopoly prices. AIDS is the perfect example of this, where treatments developed in no small part from publicly provided funds are patented and cost upwards of $20,000 year for each patient in the United States, while Brazil, which has chosen to ignore these very same patents, can offer the same treatment to AIDS patients down there for $200 / year (the government often picking up that tab and providing the medicine at no cost to the patient).
Until the researchers involved stop patenting and locking down the knowledge they are gaining in no small part from our donations and our tax dollars, I'll keep my money, and my CPU cycles, thank you very much.
Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer! (Score:2)
The end result will be a cure locked down by patents, sold at monopoly prices which only the wealthy or well insuread (two terms rapidly becoming synonymmous) can afford.
I have no intention of donating anything to fund research designed to benefit the wealthy and not the rest of us. Better to have no cure, than to have a cure whose price has been so inflated that only the well off can afford it, and which by arbitrary government fiat has been artificially made unavailable to everyone else.
Stop allowing patents on research funded by donations and public tax money and I'll reconsider, until then these sorts of charities are nothing more than just another corporate deception to take our money and use it to bolster their own profits.
Uh... What? (Score:4, Funny)
NOOO!!!!
Why have I never heard of this? I must be getting dumber!
Now I'm sure all these uber-geeks are laughing at me.
Must sit still. Must...find...something...cogent...to...say...
Re:Uh... What? (Score:5, Funny)
That wasn't it.
Why it took a week (Score:5, Informative)
"The announcement is being made now, a week later because we had to wait for comfirmation from Certicom that this is the solution. (Which we still haven't gotten, by the way)."
Re:Why it took a week (Score:2)
Worthwhile distributed computing (Score:2)
Maybe it just comes down to what can aid humanity vs. what is simply a shot in the dark.
Here's a real math mystery (Score:5, Funny)
If anyone's interested (Score:5, Funny)
FAQ:
Why will it take so long to figure out:
Short Answer: The number of Distributed Projects out there grows exponentially.
Why would anyone want to do this:
Short Answer: Nobody does
As Homer would say... (Score:2, Funny)
Attack an algorithm that matters! (Score:3, Informative)
RC5-64 was a O(2^63).
ECC-109 was a O(2^54).
JLC
Re:Attack an algorithm that matters! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but is Certicom going to pay the reward? (Score:5, Informative)
when I was little (Score:5, Insightful)
Pointless, right? Well, does this cryptography cracking have a point? We know that the algorithm will be cracked when the right key is hit. It's just as much electrowanking as jumping up and down when your
computer counts to a million, with a bit of cryptography politics thrown in.
I don't get why people are drwan to these projects over more significant problems like OGM or protein folding.
Re:when I was little (Score:2, Interesting)
This is necessary, the government would otherwise do a real world repeat of the apocryphal Bill Gates statement "640K ought to be good enough for anyone" and restrict the upper limits of cryptography that may be used. This is fine until the wrong people take advantage of this and sieze information damaging to us.
Whether there's more point to cancer research is a personal consideration. Insisting that spending time on seti v.s. cracking cryptography v.s. curing cancer is like complaining that somebody went into computer science rather than bio-medical where they could have cured cancer rather than started the next dot-com.
Re:when I was little (Score:2)
d.net is brute forcing them - which is a tactic known to be possible against every form of encryption. It basically boils down to figuring out how many keys you can try per second and assuming the worst case - that the very last key in the set will be the correct one (if you want average times then you can just assume that with enough messages you'll average out to finding the key half way through).
It's really pretty simple math, and anyone who wants to claim that "x-bit encryption is clearly enough!" is just going to be proven wrong when computers scale up to the point that your wristwatch can do y computations of x bits in a second.
I contend, rather, that current encryption schemes are secure as long as you use enough bits, where "enough" keeps growing. Of course if quantum computers ever really work then you can throw all the old school crypto methods out the window anyway.
As someone else said, there are PHB's and other idiots that don't grasp theoretical realities though, and for them it actually has to have been broken to be proven susceptible.
complaining that somebody went into computer science rather than bio-medical
Well... not quite. I'm much better at computers and programming than I am at biology, chemistry, and life sciences. Computers aren't like that though - one set of bits is just like another to them. That said, some computers do certain things far better than others, so it may be that a PPC runs RC-128 cracks way faster than it can fold proteins, but that's quibbling.
I very much agree that running distributed projects at all, or which one to run, is an individual choice. I prefer UD Cancer. Others prefer the mathematical challanges. Whatever floats your boat - osteniabbly either one is better than spinning the CPU cycles into oblivion (to which some will disagree of course!).
Re:when I was little (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that the point is that a lot of PHBs and policymakers won't believe that a given encryption technology will ever be crackable until they see that it actually has been cracked. There are a lot of people in this world who refuse to believe that anything that is still "theoretical" is either possible or important.
Re:when I was little (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they say it can't be done. Breaking encryption was touted as impossible ten years ago. "It'll take the fastest computer in the world a kajillion years to break 56 bit encryption" It actually took quite a bit less. 64 bit encryption took less than 5 years to be broken.
Distributed.net may be partially responsible for relaxing the laws on exporting encryption. Perhaps it'll take a billion years to break 8192bit encryption with todays technology, but give it 5 years, and newer computers will be able to break it in minutes.
Why not protien folding or cures for cancer? Some because there is no Linux client. Some because the result may not be made public domain. Some I do.
I have 6 machines running at home, some are running dnet, some are Seti. Some have one project running on one processor, and another project running on the other processor. But more than 50% of my cycles go to Dnet.
A suggestion (Score:5, Funny)
Journalism at its best! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Journalism at its best! (Score:2)
When I read the Slashdot posting I thought - how lame. The least they could do to add to this one sentance story is to add another sentance giving a description of what the hell it was talking about.
I think it was most likely not added to make people feel that they are not 1337 enough if they dont know what it is by default. Whatever.
Let's try this instead (Score:5, Interesting)
So now we know distributed efforts can solve great big math problems. Don't get me wrong, that's good to know and all, but.. aren't there any math problems that would be of more use than giving people with 210 IQs something else to bicker over during Star Trek conventions? Really, I'm an engineer, and sometimes I actually have to use math to do things like MAKE A FRIGGIN CAR OR SOMETHING.
There are plenty of nontrivial engineering problems out there, especially when you take a trip into thermodynamics and fluid flow. Let's solve those. Or sequence the human genome to grow an extra arm or something. Or better yet, let's put the computing power of mankind to work to randomly generate a script for Episode 3 that won't make us want to beat Lucas senseless with our plastic lightsabers. Why can people scrape together all these prizes for pointless pseudo-intellectual drivel but nobody can get some money behind something worthwhile, or at least interesting?
Here's an idea: Instead of using distributed computing for all this junk science, let's start a central distributed network. This network would have a basic interface element for all the major OS configurations, and would be able to update from the web with whatever mathematic formula and trial space it was supposed to run at a given time. Everyone everywhere could download the client, and set it up to run with whatever processor load they wanted, update on a schedule, maybe vary processor load on a schedule so it works extra hard when you're not using the system. Not much of an interface really. Then some organization, say the NSF or better yet an international science conglomerate, could alot portions of the system load to projects they deemed worthy, depending on complexity and value. The cost is basically nothing, in fact since you could get somebody on the planet to write the code for free one weekend, and the bandwidth would likely be rather low, you would most likely not be talking about the cost of funding a minor research project. Users could still run other distributed clients if they wanted, and the system would be completely voluntary. But it would attract a lot of attention and users, do some good for mankind, and direct our computing power in positive directions.
Re:Let's try this instead (Score:2, Interesting)
The scheduling/etc problems for a Grid are pretty big, so the first Grids will have nodes based in academia and each node will be pretty powerful (eg. a small cluster).
If such a scheme works and as the technology matures, maybe we'll see Grid nodes on home computers.
RB
Re:Let's try this instead (Score:2)
While I agree that we do need an open, portable distributed computing platform for these kinds of efforts, I think you have underestimated the need for communication between nodes in some kinds of calculations.
You mention fluid dynamics. These programs require data to be exchanged between nodes and their neighbors every iteration. That won't ever work when the two nodes in question are connected by 14.4 modems and down 80% of the time.
Massively distributed PC-based efforts can only work if the problem can be partitioned into parts that do not rely on any data on any other node.
Very few real life computing tasks fulfill that condition.
Re:Let's try this instead (Score:5, Informative)
!SPOILER WARNING! (Score:5, Funny)
k=281183840311601949668207954530684
Great movie, really hard to understand ending.
Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and want to see what is "state of the art computation"? See here [cray.com].
Is it just me ... (Score:3, Funny)
ECCp-109 has been solved (Score:3, Funny)
Don't you mean... (Score:2)
What's next? (Score:2)
Will slashdot please hire an editor? (Score:5, Funny)
Distributed Computing Projects (Score:4, Informative)
DC Project I would like to see... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:DC Project I would like to see... (Score:2)
can i have your cycles (Score:3, Interesting)
but seriously, what if Pixar did a distributed thing to get its movies rendered faster, wveryone gets like a fraction of a few frames at a time, which are then rendered and sent back to be composited to form an image? id be down.
Re:This is Dilution of Distributed Compute Power! (Score:4, Insightful)
Having all these different crypto challenges, protien folding challenges, SETI searches etc, just dilutes the pool of available computers for each task
Not necessarily. Each potential user is likely to be interested in only a few of these projects. I an runnning SETI, and if (when) that ends, I will probably go over to protein folding or the cancer drug search instead, as long as they have command-line clients. I'm not interested in crypto busting; it doesn't actually discover anything!
The number of projects is optimal where the average number of projects of interest to each user is a bit above 1. That probably means one crypto, one SETI, one biology, etc.
The pool is not a fixed size (Score:3, Insightful)
A little story to illustrate:
There was once a lawyer in a town. That lawyer didn't have any business, and he nearly starved to death. Then one day, another lawyer moved to town and there was more than enough business for both of them.
Re:The pool is not a fixed size (Score:2)
And all was well and good in the town for nearly six years. Then a third lawyer moved to town and that was the beginning of the end, for soon there were more more lawyers in town than non-lawyers. God saw what had become of the city and wept. And weeping lead to dispair, and dispair lead to anger. In his anger god destroyed the city in a rain of fire. But in his anger god grew careless, for his rain of fire accidentally destroyed the neighboring city of Sodom.
And so goes the story of the sin of Gomorrahry.
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Re:This is Dilution of Distributed Compute Power! (Score:5, Insightful)
The UD Cancer project is what finally got me into the distributed computing bit. Is it useful? Dunno. I hope so. But it's far more interesting to me than trying to brute force encryption (which is a known solution, and for which the time estimate can be accurately determined ahead of time), or search for signals in space (which, while I believe in extraterestial life and intelligence, I also believe in the laws of physics and seriously doubt the likelihood of any other race wasting the time and energy in broadcasting when listening is far easier, not to mention light speed constraints, diminuation and attenuation of signals on stellar scales, etc.), or finding prime numbers (useful for crypto, but current crypto is either way secure or hopelessly insecure based on quantum computing).
My wife is running the UD agent on her computers now too. At some point I'll mention it to the rest of my family and they'll probably run it - curing cancer takes on a much higher priority after your father dies from it and your mother is diagnosed with it.
I'm not going to try and force anyone run UD though. To each their own. Which, of course, is the little thing you seem to have forgotten here.
Re:This is Dilution of Distributed Compute Power! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It's been asked before, but... (Score:2)
Re:It's been asked before, but... (Score:4, Funny)
a = a
a^2 = a^2
a^2 - a^2 = a^2 - a^2
Factor both sides, one by binomial, the other by a
(a + a)(a - a) = a(a - a)
Divide by the common (a - a) factor...
(a + a) = a
2a = a
2 = 1
Therefore 1 + 1 = 2 + 1 = 3.
QED
Re:It's been asked before, but... (Score:4, Funny)
(a-a)=0 for all values of a
Damn, it sucks to be a moderator at times like ths (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Damn, it sucks to be a moderator at times like (Score:2)
That said: this spurious proof is the reason why division by 0 is "not allowed". Every kid hears this rule in primary school, and most assume it has something to do with infinite values and whatever else, but that's just not true. Division by zero is undefined because tolerating it makes for uncomfortable number systems where every number is equal to every other. As demonstrated by derf #4 in this thread.
Re:Do the next one (Score:2)
Re:Spelling (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Back in my day... (Score:2)