wee doors banging

The keyserver says: have run out of OGR-NG work.

It wasn’t too long ago that I read a similar message from my distributed.net client log regarding the OGR-25 project, but once again distributed.net has fans of distributed computing efforts rejoicing at the completion of another massive computation. They have successfully harnessed the spare capacity of thousands of ordinary computers around the world to exhaustively determine the optimal 26-mark Golomb Ruler, thus completing project OGR-26.

All those CPU cycles channelled by distributed.net proved that the shortest previously known 26-mark Golomb Ruler was in fact optimal. Once again the significance of this result is beyond my mathematics and science to comprehend, but rest assured that minds immeasurably superior to mine are thrilled, in their own immeasurably superior way, at this outcome.

Please be upstanding and welcome to the stage, the proven optimal 26-mark Golomb Ruler:

1-32-50-21-6-14-39-22-15-3-46-2-7-56-4-25-13-30-44-10-16-8-11-12-5

I’ve been a long time contributor and sometime programmer for distributed.net’s projects. My contributions to OGR-26 (PDF) placed me 411th out of all 2,754 participants, with a total of 127,103,315,862,478 (127 trillion) “nodes” tested by the various machines that I’ve pressed into service over the 122 days I was part of the project. That’s 0.0432% of the total project work (PDF) and a significant improvement over the 0.0075% that I contributed to OGR-25.

distributed.net’s OGR-NG project continues on and has already started testing the next higher order Golomb Ruler, OGR-27. The project coordinators expect this effort to be much greater than OGR-26, giving very rough estimates in the order of seven years, but excitingly they are confident that the currently best known 27 mark Golomb Ruler is not optimal and project OGR-27 will find a new, shorter one. Which would be nice for those immeasurably superior minds I mentioned above, probably.

It’s hardly rock and roll, but if you feel like helping distributed.net with OGR-27 and contributing your own fraction of a percent of an important mathematical discovery, you can download the distributed.net client program for a huge range of operating systems from their download pages. The client is unobtrusive and won’t interfere with the normal use of your computer in any way. I’ve had one sitting in the background on many a workstation over the past decade (and longer) and I’ve never had a problem with any of them, barely noticing they were there. But be sure you have the machine owner’s permission before you install anything!

In the meantime, I’ll keep on crunchin’ those blocks.