Dear all volunteers,
We are happy to announce that this BOINC project (sudoku@vtaiwan) ends with no 16-clue Sudoku puzzles found, on September 5, 2013, after running about 2 years and 8 months. The result confirms that obtained by McGuire: The minimum Sudoku problem is solved. We would like to express our gratitude to the community for contribution to this project; we could not finish it without your enthusiasm and support.
The total credit (in BOINC) is 732,404,168, equivalent to 3296.5 core-year, more than our early estimation, 2413 core-year. The difference could be due to the following reasons:
Some credits were added back, after we encountered a crash on Jan 3, 2011. Note that the project actually started on October 27, 2010. For the crash, we restarted it from January 3rd, 2011.
Some other overhead.
The total number of registered participants is 31129, and the total number of participants who have contributed is 4378.
The top 20 contributors are listed here, and the top 20 teams are listed here. Some of them whose teams or organizations are not clearly identified are outlined as follows.
The accounts "stanleylin", nchcalps, "david", "syhan", "c00ctn00" are from the computing resources of NCHC (National Center for High-performance Computing, Taiwan).
The account "Hicloud@cyc" is from the computing resources of HiCloud (Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan).
After this project ends, we do have plans for our next projects or volunteer projects, e.g., "go@vtaiwan", which aims to solve 7x7 Go or 9x9 Go positions. Note that the game-tree complexities of 7x7 Go are about 10^47, between Checkers (10^31, solved in 2007) and Othello (10^58, not solved yet). However, they are not yet ready at this moment. When ready, we will release details regarding the new project. We would also deeply appreciate your continued support for new projects in advance.
Thank you very much.
The team from sudoku@vtaiwan
2013/9/6