3 ms·
This work only established new (remarkably exact) bounds, it was not, as the quanta article poorly describes, answering the problem in the exact sense. Their "a
by babel_ 5y ago
This work only established new (remarkably exact) bounds, it was not, as the quanta article poorly describes, answering the problem in the exact sense. Their "all but solved it" is a little disingenous, as indeed it balloons quickly. Very quickly.
Exact results are only known to N=27 right now. With a single core, computing the exact result for N=16, aka Q(16), takes about 8s (using the fastest single-core method known to me). Going up to Q(17) extends that to roughly 61s, and Q(18) is over 6 and a half minutes. Q(27) took its group about a year with a large FPGA cluster.
- taeric 5y agoMakes sense. I haven't checked lately how fast the version I played with was. I do still like the visualization I put up at https://taeric.github.io/DancingLinks.html https://taeric.github.io/DancingLinks.html. if you run the snippet to add for n of 14, it is fun watching the queen march across the middle. :)
- noneeeed 5y agoYeah, the description of it being "solved" was confusing to me when reading it. I was expecting them to have found some kind of exact process for generating all the valid patterns or something. It's still great.