Comment by bmenrigh
4 hours ago
The big open question is whether a set of 5 (permutation fair) 30-sided dice exists.
I’ve been working on that on and off since 2012. I picked it up again about a month ago and have made dramatic speed improvements to my search, but exhausting the whole space I’m searching will still take my computer an estimated 70 years.
Only 70 years? If that's the case, why isn't it solved yet? Just rent 4,000 computers and have it done in less than a week.
If you're being serious, i assume its because its primarily a novelty problem, and the economic investment of 4000 computers isn't worth it just for the bragging rights of solving the problem.
Well I’m first exhausting some promising regions of the search space which should complete in less than 2 weeks. After that I strongly suspect a solution doesn’t exist (for the column grouped space I’m searching).
If it were just a matter of a few thousand dollars of computer time (say, less than $5000) the money would already be spent and I’d have an answer.
We’ll see, I may build the tooling to distribute the search and enlist help from others interested.
It’s only been about 2 weeks since I was able to drop the runtime from “age of the universe” levels to just decades.
Posting it here will almost certainly lead to a "May the best clanker win" contest, you realize!