Happy new year 2010!

Here is the first update of the year : we have received 12.13% of the results.

16 697 552 861 of 137 652 178 995 positions have been computed.

The update is late because of the great number of results we received during the holidays :)

Now there, the graal page reports 13.33% complete when we've done 894,000 more results than received by the scientists. That'd put us over 14.5% complete from our crunchers side, with the last batch seen on my part being 303 :D

Ah? Received my first first 314 parent on the 22nd afternoon and many others since then, parents and children. A larger one this 314, with the next one about the same size.

Edit: And two 315 parents have just been delivered to the queue, 45 minutes after I posted.

Amazing, when I stop and think about how much has been done yet how much we have to do. That with computers for the most part that are constantly increasing the increasing the multiple of what existed on earth just 60 years ago. Where will we be in 10 or 20 years much less 60 or 100 years from now?

judson Somerville it is an interesting and extremely hard question.
History shows that short term predictions are over optimistic and long term predictions are under optimistic.
Now 20 years is short term and 100 years is long term.
We have no past experience of what happened over 100 year time span to computing power. I mean in the modern sense, that is with a CPU as we know it. If we take the first CPU the Intel 4004, available to the general public 35 years ago, it was rated to 0.07 MIPS. I just ran a few minutes ago the Sandra benchmark on my Intel I7 975 EE clocked at 3.6 Ghz, with DDR3 memory running 2 GHz at CL8.
The result was about 83'000 MIPS. The improvement is 1.2 millionfold. I compare apple with apples here. If you take dedicated crunching processors like latest GPU's it would be even more.
Now in 20 years could it be another millionfold?. According to Moore law with a doubling every year it is indeed a millionfold in 20 years. But what then in a 100 year. Optical computing, Quantum computing could be fully operational and then the known laws may not apply anymore.
Moore Law applied over 100 years we get the number 1.26x10^30 fold which is simply an undescriptible number with 30 zeros. The law becomes meaningless.
I could very well imagine a millionfold improvement over 20 years and maybe even more. But on a 100 year span no way to even imagine. Electricity that powers our computers started to be produced by power plants only 130 years ago.