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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."

2 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.

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  2. 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.

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