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Paterson's Worms Solved by Number-Crunching

Posted by michael on from the get-a-bigger-hammer dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Thirty years ago, Martin Gardner described Paterson's Worms to the world. Just recently, Benjamin Chaffin, one of the designers of the Pentium 4 chip, managed to trace a couple trillion steps of the 'unsolved' worms, and has pretty much solved all but two of them."

6 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Chaffin solves Patterson's Worms... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Sounds painful...

  2. Of course, my first reaction was by digital+bath · · Score: 1, Funny

    ...how the hell did he have the patience to step through "a couple trillion" lines of code in a worm???

    Then I read the article. These worms, then - they're basically more complex versions of the Game of Life, right?

    --
    find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
  3. trippy by cr@ckwhore · · Score: 4, Funny

    After reading the article, I'm left scratching my head about what this really means and how it might be useful in every day life.

    The obvious answer is that the worms are psychodelic. Those are some "trippy ass worms", as can be concluded from the illustrations in the article. Those worms are on acid.

    --
    Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
  4. Or... by TheSpoom · · Score: 5, Funny

    Another great background for that monitor that can do 30000x40000.

    --
    It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
    - E. Debs
  5. Run this on Big Mac by Qrlx · · Score: 3, Funny

    from the article Currently my grid is about 1.57 million points on a side

    If he's saying that the 2 worms hit the end of the 1.57million^2 grid, in a non-repeating pattern, that's pretty neato. We must know where it ends! Put it on Big Mac, make the grid bigger, and call it iWorms.

  6. Oh no by JWhiton · · Score: 2, Funny

    Oh great, another worm? Where do I get the patch from this time?