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ECCp-109 Solved

Posted by michael on from the sheer-willpower dept.

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..."

17 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. ars by tymellon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Guess what

    You guys here at /. got beat by Ars Technica. (in more ways than one)

    We ought to get the people here behind some distributed computing project. I bet we could beat any other team.

    1. Re:ars by mjp9055 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      or better yet, slashdot should start a feature dedicated to worthwhile distributed computing projects.

  2. Re:This is Dilution of Distributed Compute Power! by seanellis · · 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.

    --
    Sean Ellis
    Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
  3. Cancer? by Penguinoflight · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Cancer is one of the medical institutions major source of income, if it were cured, what would we do with all the stupid research centers? Many people think that cancer can be cured by using good food, lots of greens, no meat, etc. But really nobody considers this because it doesn't make money.

    --
    "And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
    1 John 4:14
    1. Re:Cancer? by protohiro1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There is a difference between cured and prevention. I don't think that the drug companies are conspiring to hide a cure for cancer to make more money. They would make a lot more money if they HAD a cure. That they could patent. And charge for.

      --
      Sig removed because it was obnoxious
    2. Re:Cancer? by remou · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think the reason is even more fundamental.

      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)

    3. Re:Cancer? by scotch · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Well, I think your nose and throat are really susceptible to cancer if you smoke. But plenty of people get prostrate or breast or bowel or brain cancer who don't smoke or drink.

      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.

      --
      XML causes global warming.
  4. The pool is not a fixed size by Charlton+Heston · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The more projects there are, the more interest in the projects that there will be, and the larger the available pool of people willing to donate cycles.

    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.

    --
    Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape
  5. Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So post in the UD Forums suggesting a Linux client. If enough Linux users do this, I'm sure they'll eventually seek to please them.

  6. when I was little by shren · · Score: 5, Insightful
    When I was little, I loved to write computer programs that would count. They'd start at one and count upward, and I'd keep track of when it gained decimil places.

    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.

    --
    Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
    1. Re:when I was little by Dr+Caleb · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I don't get why people are drwan to these projects

      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.

      --
      "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
  7. Re:This is Dilution of Distributed Compute Power! by Zathrus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh, you're right. We should only run one at a time. Which one? RC-128 cracking? Go for it. Not interested. SETI@Home? Ok, but seeing as how I knew about it for years and never bothered downloading the client I suspect that would've continued for, oh say, eternity.

    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.

  8. Journalism at its best! by Stonehead · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sigh. Insert obligatory sulky comment about tired Slashdot editors who were again too lazy to do any homework and include a description or background on ECCp-109. Instead, "What is it!?" screaming readers all over the place. Well, thanks. You want that Slashdot effect to happen to them, don't you?

  9. Wow... by delta407 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    To everyone who particpated: Thank you for helping, and not letting those CPU cycles go to waste. Projects and challenges like these are very important to really, really know what the state of the art is in computation.
    Frankly, I don't see how brute-forcing an elliptic curve encryption algorithm is productive in any way. We know it can be broken by scanning the keyspace, and we don't need trillions of CPU cycles to prove it. So, practice has proven mathematics right again. The result was known beforehand, so how does this help anyone?

    Oh, and want to see what is "state of the art computation"? See here.
  10. Re:Attack an algorithm that matters! by CynicTheHedgehog · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is that standard O-notation or something different? O(2^64) = O(k) = kO(1) = constant time, which would be kind of strange for encryption. 2^64 instruction cycles (or whatever) wouldn't be all that heavy on typical hardware. Regular O-notation would be O(2^n), where n=64, 63, and 54, respectively.

  11. Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer! by akruppa · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'd *love* to switch from SETI to the cancer research program, but I'm definitely not switching to Windows to do it!

    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. 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

    --
    Heisenberg may have been here
  12. Re:Attack an algorithm that matters! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Suppose you had 2^64 simple floating point operations to complete. A super-cluster capable of 35000 GFLOPS would take ~6 days to finish this task. This would definitely be heavy on typical hardware.