God's number known after 30 years!

[Brian Ellis]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10929159

One wonders how much public money was spent on this!

[Dr Mordrid]

Math research sometimes takes mysterious forms and this is one. I'm sure the techniques they developed will come in handy in some other forms of data analysis, just as Game Theory has.

[Brian Ellis]

Not so sure, in this case, as the proof was empirical, not by pure maths.

Anyway, God could count only up to 7!

[Marshmallowman]

More of an exercise in computer science, but still numerical analysis is huge chunk of research math now

[VJ]

I read somewhere that google donated the computer time... so the public money spent may not have been so much. Besides, even if the proof was empirical, they first optimized the problem to a minimum number of empirical steps, generated distributed code, ... I'm sure it will have benefits we don't immediately notice...

Just a shame it is 20 and not... 42.

[Brian Ellis]

I read somewhere that google donated the computer time... so the public money spent may not have been so much.

But this State Uni prof had been working on the problem for 30 years. Even if he averaged only 5 mins/day, that totals ~500 hours (200 days/y). That's a lot of money if you count all the infrastructure of the faculty.