No Magic In A Knight's Tour 278
morgothan writes "As reported in an article on Math World the solution, or rather lack of solution has been found to the over one hundred fifty year old math problem of how many numbers of magic tours a knight can make on a standard 8x8 chessboard. It turn out that there exist one hundred forty distinct semimagic tours, but no magic tour. The solution came after 61.40 CPU-days, corresponding to 138.25 days of computation at 1 GHz, the project was completed on August 5, 2003 in which every possible enumeration was tried out. The author of the software that finally solved the problem has also put up a webpage in which he further explains the problem and his method of solving it." Thanks to Mig for pointing out a great background page on Chessbase.com.
Magic Tours... (Score:3, Funny)
No wonder he didnt only got a Semimagic tour, damn you Travelocity! Damn you to hell!
Tired out (Score:3, Funny)
I bet the horse was tired after hopping around so much.
For our next experiment... (Score:5, Funny)
Now we're going to examine how many routes there are through all the bars in Amsterdam, and see if there are any "magic" routes that will let us complete the circuit without falling drunk in a bed of tulips.
Re:For our next experiment... (Score:3, Funny)
Purely for medicinal purposes, you understand...
Re:Magic Tours... (Score:3, Funny)
maybe I'm on a "magic tour" right now!!
Re:A note to the anti-MS zealots (Score:3, Funny)
> The webpage mentions that the program is windows based and doesn't save state. That means that all of those CPU hours came in a row (at idle priority even). Bash MS all you want, but Windows isn't as unstable and problematic as all of your anti-MS zealots would like to believe.
61.40 CPU-days spread between 10 people's computers, and you think that indicates enough uptime to brag about? Puh-leeze.
Re:A note to the anti-MS zealots (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That's nice, but not impressive (Score:2, Funny)
Given: an 8x8 chess board, a black knight piece, a Cray supercomputer
1. Execute brutechess.exe
2. Therefore, there are no magic knight's tours.
Artistic Differences? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Interesting problem... (Score:1, Funny)
Why?
Oh yes, we don't have to spend some of the brightest minds have to work on a useless problem anymore. But I'm sure they'll find another one.
Clip clop (Score:5, Funny)
Nope, but they got through about six coconuts.
Re:Magic Tours... (Score:3, Funny)
-B
Re:That's nice, but not impressive (Score:5, Funny)
I spy an Nvidia engineer!
A pedantic geek says . . . (Score:5, Funny)
The solution came after 61.40 CPU-days, corresponding to 138.25 days of computation at 1 GHz
Yeah, and I came to work in 12.34 horsepower-hours, corresponding to 666.13 hours of driving at 5K RPM. I mean, damn, I understand when my mom utters movie-level technobabble, but this?
Think of words ending in 'gry.' (Score:4, Funny)
Cheers (Score:2, Funny)
Re:1GHz WHAT? (Score:5, Funny)
Good grief. It's just an estimate. It's not the exact compute time that's interesting. It still tells me the interesting bits-- that it was a complexity that an ordinary PC could do in a reasonable time frame, not the sort of thing a gigantic cluster chewed on for 100 years.
Re:1GHz WHAT? (Score:3, Funny)
A chess article without Go mentioned? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Magic Tours... (Score:2, Funny)
Did the Knight beat the Bishop on such a long, lonely journey, I wonder?
Sure he can... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Interesting problem... (Score:2, Funny)