Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do? • Hacker News Board

cperciva wrote: post #7

bbuffone wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that you mention it, I can't think of anything better for humanity.

You have a very limited imagination.

I don't think that Conficker is going to be making an impact on world hunger very soon.

Re: Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do?

#16

Post by niyazpk » Wed, Apr 01, 2009, 2:42 PM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #2

Calculate the quintillionth bit of Pi. With ten million reasonably modern computers it shouldn't take more than 12-24 hours.

Then what?

Re: Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do?

#17

Post by randomwalker » Wed, Apr 01, 2009, 2:43 PM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #2

Calculate the quintillionth bit of Pi. With ten million reasonably modern computers it shouldn't take more than 12-24 hours.

To those who might have missed what the parent is talking about, in 1995 a formula was discovered that lets you calculate the n'th bit of pi without calculating the previous n-1 bits. This surprised everyone.

The consequence is that you can compute the n'th bit in essentially linear time, and essentially constant memory. By traditional methods, computing the quintillionth bit would be unthinkable.

However, I doesn't look like the algorithm is parallelizable in a meaningful way. Any thoughts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe_formula

Re: Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do?

#18

Post by juliend2 » Wed, Apr 01, 2009, 2:51 PM UTC

1-setup the biggest cloudcomputing host.

2-profit.

Re: Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do?

#19

Post by cperciva » Wed, Apr 01, 2009, 2:51 PM UTC

randomwalker wrote: post #17

cperciva wrote: post #2

Calculate the quintillionth bit of Pi. With ten million reasonably modern computers it shouldn't take more than 12-24 hours.

To those who might have missed what the parent is talking about, in 1995 a formula was discovered that lets you calculate the n'th bit of pi without calculating the previous n-1 bits. This surprised everyone. The consequence is that you can compute the n'th bit in essentially linear time, and essentially constant memory. By traditional methods, computing the quintillionth bit would be unthinkable. However, I doesn't…

The BBP algorithm is not only parallelizable, it's embarrassingly parallel. Each term in the series can be computed independently of the rest.

In case you missed half of the joke: The PiHex project computed the quadrillionth bit of Pi back in 1998-2000... and was run by yours truly.

Re: Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do?

#20

Post by nwinter » Wed, Apr 01, 2009, 2:58 PM UTC

ejs wrote: post #4

Update all the people with ie6 to something newer

How difficult would it be to write a virus that fixed common system vulnerabilities? Could one write something that would run Windows Update, download Spybot and some other free antivirus programs to do a sweep, update Java and Flash, etc.?