Slashdot Mirror

New submitter Otis_INF writes "To honor Alan Turing, two researchers at the CWI built a simple LEGO Turing Machine, to show everyone how simple a computer actually is. Primary goals were to make every operation as visible as possible and to make it using just a single LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT set." And if a simple Turing machine gets old, Reader miller60 adds a link to this Lego data center "that recreates all the major features of an IT facility, assembled from 5,772 pieces, 28 figures, and 1 meter of fiber optic cable. The builder, Tanaka, has uploaded details to the Lego Digital Designer Gallery so others can build and adapt their own."

An Anonymous Reader wrote in to mention that, according to an informational page about the venerable game Hack, today is Hack's 20th birthday. From the page: "In December 1984 I distributed Hack 1.0 in the newsgroup net.sources.... [T]here were 15 pieces, all sent out on 17-Dec-84." From the reader: "This was the first widespread distribution of the game, which was created by Jay Fenlason a couple of years previously. Nethack's history continues here. You can download this descendant of Rogue from its home page, or connect to a nethack server. Many nethack veterans try their hand at Slash'EM, a.k.a., "nethack on amphetamines". Here's to another 20 years of training your dog to rip off shopkeepers."

N. Megill writes: "Computer scientist and obfuscated code aficionado John Tromp has devised what may be the world's most compact Universal Machine (Postscript research paper) to date. Written in the 'S-K combinatory logic' language, which has only 2 commands (S and K), his UM can be encoded with only 272 bits (34 bytes), compared to 5495 bits for the Universal Turing Machine given in Roger Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind ."

N. Megill writes: "Computer scientist and obfuscated code aficionado John Tromp has devised what may be the world's most compact Universal Machine (Postscript research paper) to date. Written in the 'S-K combinatory logic' language, which has only 2 commands (S and K), his UM can be encoded with only 272 bits (34 bytes), compared to 5495 bits for the Universal Turing Machine given in Roger Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind ."

N. Megill writes: "Computer scientist and obfuscated code aficionado John Tromp has devised what may be the world's most compact Universal Machine (Postscript research paper) to date. Written in the 'S-K combinatory logic' language, which has only 2 commands (S and K), his UM can be encoded with only 272 bits (34 bytes), compared to 5495 bits for the Universal Turing Machine given in Roger Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind ."

Alec Muffett writes " On Thursday, a small team of people (including myself) announced the world's first factorisation of a 512-bit RSA encryption key (aka: RSA-155) - considerably bigger than the RSA-129 challenge of several years ago, and this time performed by a small cabal of numbercrunchers, just to see if it could be done in secret. There are press releases and announcements available, as well as considerable discussion in sci.crypt. " Read on for what Alec has to say on the matter. This is a significant advance because such 512-bit length keys are routinely used in (possibly ill-advised?) transaction protocols for some important financial institutions (read: some serious $$$$$$$ may be at risk in the near future) - and moreover, as a factoring contributor, I can state that I personally have now been offered the use of additional hardware which could take the 6 or 7 months spent sieving for results, and reduce the time by a factor of some 40% to 60%.