ECCp-109 Solved

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..."

Comments

What will you do?

[Charlton Heston]

Folding!

Re:What will you do?

[circletimessquare]

or, make math history (and possibly win a couple of grand)

find the 40th Mersenne Prime

Re:What will you do?

[Omnifarious]

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.

Re:Cancer?

[Spoing]

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.

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.

Let's try this instead

[laigle]

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:when I was little

[Waffle Iron]

Well, does this cryptography cracking have a point? We know that the algorithm will be cracked when the right key is hit.

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:What are you going to do? Beat cancer!

[FreeUser]

Here [ud.com] you can donate your CPU cycles to help discover a cure for cancer. If that's not a noble cause, no telling what is.

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.