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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. 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
  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.

    --
    The sky is green, the grass is blue.
  3. 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.