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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."

4 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Of course, my first reaction was by way2trivial · · Score: 2, Informative

    john conmway, the other name in the opening, I believe was the inventor of life.

    --
    every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
  2. Worms and computers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    A good overview can be found in
    B. Hayes "In search of the optimal scumsucking bottomfeeder", American Scientist vol. 91, no. 5 pp392-396 (2003)

  3. Other sites by goddess_warshipr · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are more pictures at Benjamin Chaffin's page.
    There is more information on the games and rules at Sven's page, that includes a comparison of Chaffin's notation to Gardner's and a comparison of Worms to the Game of Life.

    --
    The sky is green, the grass is blue.
  4. STUPID FUCKING MODS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Next time, try reading the fucking thing.

    Idiots. Asshats. The lot of you.