alt Hacker Newswhat's most interesting to me about this research is that it is an online collaborative one. I wonder how many more project such as this there are, and if it could be more widespread, maybe as a platform.
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This comment reminded me to check whether https://www.distributed.net/ was still in existence. I hadn't thought about the site for probably two decades, I ran the client for this back in the late 1990s back when they were cracking RC5-64, but they still appear to be going as a platform that could be used for this kind of thing.
The BB Challenge site is really well structured:
In the paper we mention two other communities which seem to have similar structure and size:
- https://conwaylife.com/, on Conway's GoL and other cellular automata
- Googology, https://googology.fandom.com/wiki/Googology_Wiki and https://googology.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page, on big numbers
In recent years there has been a movement to collaborate on math proofs via blueprints (dependency graphs) in the Lean language, which seems related.
For example:
https://teorth.github.io/equational_theories/
https://teorth.github.io/pfr/