Dear friends,
distributed.net is proud to announce the completion of OGR-27!
It is almost five years ago to the day that we began on this exciting journey. Almost 20,000 of you joined us.. without whom, it would have been impossible.
We have proven conclusively by the exhaustive search of all possible rulers that the previously predicted 27-mark ruler is indeed the most optimal one. We were confident that we would find a more optimal ruler during this search, but it was not to be.
We expected it to take us seven years to complete this awesome task but thanks to your efforts recruiting your friends and co-workers to our effort and a little help from Moore’s Law, we did it in five.
The best known ruler is 27/3-12-26-25-29-2-9-36-10-68-1-4-17-53-35-8-16-28-6-14-13-71-18-19-23-7 (length 553). Represented the other way, this is marks at positions 0 3 15 41 66 95 97 106 142 152 220 221 225 242 295 330 338 354 382 388 402 415 486 504 523 546 553.
In total, we verified 302,621,586 unique stubs (2,526 with 3-diffs, 179,120 with 4-diffs, 6,457,815 with 5-diffs and 295,982,125 with 6-diffs), requiring each to have been completed at least two times independently and with an identical node count. Additionally, due to a client implementation bug in some early clients, we required all stubs to have been verified at least once by a client greater than v2.9109.518. This delayed us by a few weeks towards the end of the project but was necessary to ensure that no work was skipped.
The shortest ruler was sent to us 11 times, with one user completing it twice. I will be writing to this user directly for some help picking lottery numbers!
We will be sending some distributed.net swag to the lucky winners and hope that you will join us as we move on to our next challenge!
Moo! 