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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."

3 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. It is my belief that... by cliffy2000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Brute force is killing thought. We do not learn from randomly testing cases. The scientific method has degraded to the point of oblivion.
    Apparently, Frank Herbert was wrong. Brute force is the mind killer, not fear.

    1. Re:It is my belief that... by dekashizl · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Brute force is killing thought. We do not learn from randomly testing cases.
      It is an interesting point you bring up, but I think there is a lot we can learn from brute force approaches to problem solving. Your mind, in a sense, employs brute force approaches to many of its tasks. It just so happens that the billions of cycles happen in parallel rather than in serial, and the algorithms are a bit different than the ones we're used to.

      When you read this post, aside from thinking how brilliant it is, various small parts of your mind are frantically pattern matching millions of visual features simultaneously, and your "attention" is focusing a higher level consciousness onto part of that field, at which point millions of more patterns are being matched against the results of that first run, where you see letters and words, and those get matched against millions of words you've seen before, etc. etc. Brute force is everywhere around you. It is thought.
  2. Brute Force by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This isn't much of a solution, in particular he can only say that some worms "appear infinite" and he couldn't prove that two worms were identical except for being rotated by 180 degrees. While his programs would be useful to an individual studying the worms to try form conjectures regarding symmetry and halting they should not be confused with real solutions. Understanding should be the first aspect to any solution.