Sort of like the Four Color Theorem, in that it's something that was proven with computers and brute force. I remembering hearing mathemeticians were upset about it because it just felt wrong to prove it that way (this was the 70s, it may have been the first proof that was done by machine) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem</a>
<i>We broke the problem down into 2,217,093,120 smaller problems</i><p>Off topic, but this is a brilliant sentence to use especially outside of the original context. Like if you broke someone else's ugly vase.
There was significant discussion of this in an earlier submission:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587340" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587340</a><p>Discussion there is closed as it's so old, so if you want to say anything new, this is the place to do it.
These results are really cool because first when you look at such a problem space, the size may look insurmountable but with clever algorithms one can always hope to solve it in reasonable time. Whether 35 CPU years is reasonable, I don't know. :)
It's a shame about the religious babble brought into this by the people who ran it.<p>"One may suppose God would use a much more efficient algorithm"<p>It still could have been fun and been along the lines of "One may suppose a god would use a much more efficient algorithm"<p>But there's only one true god evidently. Lets ignore those stupid religions that have many gods.
i thought god's number was seven:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsHITZRCgqs&feature=kp" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsHITZRCgqs&feature=kp</a>