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On 11/08/10 14:03, Julian Hall wrote:
'A 30-year quest to find the minimum number of moves needed to solve every one of the billions of configurations for a Rubik's Cube may have ended.'Not always - sometimes the amount of data that needs to be distributed around the various PC's means its not worth the effort - this looks like one. Then again the it could be a cant see the wood for the trees problem - like Fermats last theorem - didnt fit in the margin of his notebook but I bet it didnt take up the 200 odd pages the prize winning solution gave. I think all you had to prove there was x**n is always less than x**(n+1) (for +ve integer n and x) and that was that. The rubics cube looks like there should be a sieve of eratosthenes type solution - theres only 4000 billion different states in 20 moves of rubic and if calculated using machine code thats only a couple of days on a modern pchttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10929159Wouldn't this be a classic case for distributed computing? Since they've spent 30 years and still not finished I would have thought so.Julian
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