2022 Year End Summary
2022 was the year of ℚ(√-10) (subfield 7), as most of our time was spent on that search. Many new fields were found and we are now entering the final row of the search. In the next 3 to 6 months we should be at the point where we can say with almost certainty that it is complete.

The goals for 2023 are simple:
1. Get subfield 7 to the point where it is essentially complete.
2. Go back and officially complete subfield 3, so we can say with 100% certainty that it is done.
3. Do more on subfield 7 or move on to subfield 6 (the final search).

Thanks everyone for your contributions and have a wonderful New Year!
1 Jan 2023, 20:20:10 UTC · Discuss

Future of the Project
I've been procrastinating in sharing some news and I finally got around to doing it.

My old thesis advisor who has been backing this project retired in May. I don't actually work for the university, so this means the project has lost is primary benefactor.

The good news is that the university has allowed the project to continue. The bad news is that they will not be supporting any more hardware upgrades. This means when the current hardware fails the project will come to an end.

I'm hoping the current hardware can last several more years. One of the most critical parts is the hard drive, and we just got a new one about 1.5 years ago. Given that the previous hard drive lasted over 4 years, this is a positive.

This news has played into my reasoning on the order of the searches. Given that sf3 is practically guaranteed to be complete, I though it was prudent to use our finite time to first concentrate on sf7. The short term goal is to get sf7 to the same state that sf3 is currently in, which should take us into early next year. At that point, we can either spend the time to finish off sf3 and sf7, or continue on with sf6. Doing sf6 will allow us to find more fields in the finite time we have left, but finishing off sf3 and sf7 will allow us to say with 100% certainty that they are indeed complete. I am leaning towards finishing off sf3 and sf7, but that may change as time goes on.
10 Aug 2022, 17:18:41 UTC · Discuss

New badge type
To help increase interest in the project, I am creating a new badge based on fields counts, and tuned especially towards subfield 7. If this works well, I will also create separate badges for the other subfields.

I already put the hooks in to keep tract of the field counts for sf7. Now it's just a matter of creating the badge images, etc. Hopefully that should be done in the next several days.

Happy crunching!
1 Jul 2022, 21:42:58 UTC · Discuss

BOINC Pentathlon


Welcome BOINC Pentathlon participants!

I would have posted earlier, but it was hard to reach the server after the initial onslaught. Things seem to be stabilized, at least for the time being...
7 May 2022, 16:22:27 UTC · Discuss

2021 Year in Review
So another year has come and gone.

This was not the best year. We started the year with a severe hard drive crash that took weeks to recover from. After that, the year was spent on the search over ℚ(√2) (subfield 3). This search should be complete within several months. A single search seems like a small accomplishment, but I should point out that this is a gigantic search that just several years ago seemed out of reach.

Other than that, in November support was added for Intel GPUs. The app worked for the most part but performance was disappointing. We look forward to the new Intel Arc GPUs coming out this year which should perform much better.

Thanks everyone for your contributions and have a wonderful New Year!
1 Jan 2022, 20:27:19 UTC · Discuss

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