Take a Rubik’s cube. Shuffle it. It can be solved with at most 20 moves. That is a fascinating result!

From the article:

Finally, we were able to distribute the 55,882,296 cosets of H among a large number of computers at Google and complete the computation in just a few weeks. Google does not release information on their computer systems, but it would take a good desktop PC (Intel Nehalem, four-core, 2.8GHz) 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 CPU years, to perform this calculation.

And now, some late-night number shuffling.

First, let’s make an educated guess of one quad-core 2.8 GHz Intel Nehalem doing about, say, 11.2 GFLOPS. Then, given 1.1 billion seconds spent for the task, the total task used up a total of about 2^63 floating point operations (an interesting power of 2, no?). Google’s computers did this in “just a few weeks” (2 weeks = 1209600 seconds), so that’s about 2^43 floating point operations per second for the mystery number of computers, i.e. the computers achieved a total of 10185 GFLOPS = ca. 10 TFLOPS. Divided with the GFLOPS per CPU, that’d mean about 909 CPUs, given the initial guesstimated specs for the Nehalems.

Yes, an easier way to calculate is to find how how many parallel units there were by calculating 1.1 billion seconds / 1209600 seconds = 909, but the above description is nicer to follow. YMMV.

So, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, and factoring in some uncertainties about the times, Davidson, Dethridge, Kociemba and Rokicki used a grand total of about a 1000 or so quad-core Intel Nehalem 2.8 GHz CPUs (or equivalent) for the task.

Anyway, 10 TFLOPS in itself is a nice number but really nothing special. It is not enough to reach even the 500th supercomputer position of the June 2010 list of top500.org. However, do keep in mind that the number of CPUs used for the Rubik’s cube task was obviously but a small fraction of the real ultimate Ninja CPU power that Google can harness at will.

And now, good night!

David Beckingsale mailed me to say he has started a WordPress-theme that is a derivative of Sandbox, with Zenburn colours. Nice! Grab it from Github: http://github.com/davidbeckingsale/ZenSandbox

CSS gurus ahoy, David also wanted to say that he’s happy to receive contributions to the theme if people feel any aspects of the theme can be improved.

I recently had the luck of finding out about a computer game called Osmos.

The game itself is very simple; you’re a blob of energy or somesuch, and you grow bigger by consuming blobs smaller than you. You can move around by expelling small pieces of your mass, this makes you smaller and more vulnerable to other blobs.

Sounds maybe too simple? Well! Not quite, the blobs have inertia, there is repulsing blobs and so on.

Also, the presentation is simply so wonderfully calm and beautiful. Set on an ambient music background, playing the game has some sort of tranquilling effect on me. It’s kind of like watching a lava lamp, and playing it too.

Check out the Osmos demo, and if you like it, buy it. It’s only $10. I bought it and I think it’s well worth the money.

Some reading for lazy weekend evenings. The MIT AI Memo 239, also known as “HAKMEM” contains mathematical and programmatical hacks from the times when computers were wood and men were steel. You can read it here: HAKMEM.

PS. See item 63 for description why 239 is a nice number.

JP Morgan accumulate profit margin invest destroy in full effect!

Check out a quite interesting/entertaining/sad article in the Rolling Stone magazine. It’s a story about corruption on so many levels.

It’s like gambling on the weather. If your bondholders are expecting you to pay an interest rate based on the average temperature in Alabama, you don’t do a rate swap with a bank that gives you back a rate pegged to the temperature in Nome, Alaska.

Not unless you’re a fucking moron. Or your banker is JP Morgan.

(Cheers to Global Guerrillas for the link.)

An interesting read: “A life in the day: David de Rothschild“. Yes, he’s one of those famous Rothschilds.

He’s planning to sail a catamaran created from recycled plastic junk to an area in the Pacific Ocean, where all kinds of plastic junk is circulating and destroying the wildlife.

We’ll sail through some of the world’s most ecologically threatened regions, including the Great Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, where currents converge and marine debris — 90% plastic — gathers. As this debris consists of microscopic fragments, it’s getting straight into the food chain.

Thanks to Christophe-Marie, who sent me a link of a very interesting video of a UI concept where the mouse is no longer relevant. Instead, multi-finger touch is used, with quite natural gestures.

Here’s the 10/GUI video by C. Miller.

Why do I like it?
(more…)

BBC reports on the self-taught hardware hacker William Kamkwamba, who recycles junk to build electricity-generating windmills in Malawi.

Meanwhile, he installed a solar-powered mechanical pump, donated by well-wishers, above a borehole, adding water storage tanks and bringing the first potable water source to the entire region around his village.

When he ran into bugs, he had to debug and refactor the original design a little:

He upgraded his original windmill to 48-volts and anchored it in concrete after its wooden base was chewed away by termites.

It’s ingenious stuff, check it out.

According to this article, executives travelling to China are advised to buy a separate mobile phone to be used only in China. This is to avoid spying and to work around corporate espionage.

The timing of the article is to create media noise for the upcoming (?) US-China trade war. Howeeeeeever, that’s not the most interesting part of that article. This is:

Mark Bregman, chief technology officer at security firm Symantec said he left his MacBook Pro behind in the US and took his MacBook Air whenever he flew to China. Bregman said he only ever used the Air in China and re-imaged the machine every time he returned home.

Interesting? Very much so: the CTO of one of the biggest providers of anti-virus/security products for Windows doesn’t even use Windows himself! He uses an Apple MacBook. That tells you something, doesn’t it?

Behold the Jackie Chan’s SUPERCOLOR Ping Pong Master, as presented by my friend and old colleague Mr. Elpuri.