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Comment by Petersipoi

6 hours ago

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.

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!

    • If someone wants to beat me to either a solution, or proving no solutions exists, then by all means :-)

      I think it's an extraordinarily hard problem computationally, even with exceptional theoretical backing.

      Where people may be able to beat me is if no solution exists-- there may be some highly nontrivial, but findable unsatisfiability argument.

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.