World's Oldest Puzzle Solved

An anonymous reader observes: "The Loculus of Archimedes, the world's oldest puzzle, has been solved. It has 536 solutions. You can find the details here."

Computation

[GrahamMastaFlash]

Isn't it amazing that a computer could compute in minutes what has taken humans thousands of years to solve? We're in a time in which the sheer calculating power of computers can predict stress and failure in complex structures (FEA), lift and drag of fluid flows (CFD), and even the way a polypeptide will fold into a protein.

If computers can do all this and solve puzzles that have plagued our minds for centuries, where will the limit be? Perhaps one day the effect of a drug in a patient or the release of software into a market will be fully simulated through computation.

We will soon be replacing our market analysits and physicians with programmers!

Re:Computation

[OneFix]

While I want to belive what you say, I must point out that you are making a mistake. This puzzle is purely logical (mechanical)...the things you mention (market economics and human-drug interaction) are organic in nature...

Computers are good at doing mechanical computations, but we have yet to perfect computation of organic systems...as a matter of fact, some would say it's impossible.

They already are

[Froze]

There has been a lot of developement into finding self solving systems. Here is an article to get you started, then just follow google.
readme [newscientist.com]

Re:Computation

[Dorival]

"Perhaps one day the effect of a drug in a patient or the release of software into a market will be fully simulated through computation."

In the 60's I was a programmer/statistician with no medical background for a large group of physicians engaged in clinical trials of cancer chemotherapy. I created a simulation model of the human blood system that was able to predict the future toxic effects of the chemotherapy after only a few doses.

The doctors rejected it because I was not a doctor. My theory was confirmed 15 years later by others. My boss (the chief of surgery) had suggested I should go to Med School. The chief of Hematology liked my work, but only because it explained the findings in his own paper published in the Annals of Hematology 15 years before. At that time a physics student who had been blasted with cobalt 60 pellets had been brought to the hospital and as a young intern he had the good sense to run every test possible for 90 days straight. My model predicted exactly what he had seen. Even when the radiation source was removed the blood values continued to oscillate up and down on their own as the body responded according to my model.

The chemotherapists were erring in not accounting for the body's built-in response mechanisms, and they didn't want to hear it from me.