Reader John Tromp points to an explanation posted at GitHub of a computational challenge Tromp coordinated that makes a nice companion to the recent discovery of a 22 million-digit Mersenne prime. A distributed effort using pooled computers from two centers at Princeton, and more contributed from the HP Helion cloud, after “many hiccups and a few catastrophes” calculated the number of legal positions in a 19×19 game of Go. Simple as Go board layout is, the permutations allowed by the rules are anything but simple to calculate: “For running an L19 job, a beefy server with 15TB of fast scratch diskspace, 8 to 16 cores, and 192GB of RAM, is recommended. Expect a few months of running time.” More: Large numbers have a way of popping up in the game of Go. Few people believe that a tiny 2×2 Go board allows for more than a few hundred games. Yet 2×2 games number not in the hundreds, nor in the thousands, nor even in the millions. They number in the hundreds of billions! 386356909593 to be precise. Things only get crazier as you go up in boardsize. A lower bound of 10^10^48 on the number of 19×19 games, as proved in our paper, was recently improved to a googolplex. (For anyone who wants to double check his work, Tromp has posted as open source the software used.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Finally Calculated: All the Legal Positions In a 19×19 Game of Go
BitTorrent has released a new version of its Sync peer-to-peer app, and its biggest feature is the encrypted folder. Any data you keep in one will be encrypted, whether you choose to place it on cloud storage or on a networked storage device (NAS). Plus, your files are always encrypted while they’re being transferred. When you create one of these folders , you get three types of keys. The Read-Write key allows peers to access and modify its contents, the Read-Only key gives peers the power to access and decrypt the files, while the Encrypted key only allows peers to receive the files — they won’t be able to decrypt them. For instance, you can provide your clients with a Read-Write key to allow them to modify the documents you’re working on. But, you can give vendors Read Only keys to show them what you have to offer. If you want to make a backup, say on a cloud service, you can make a folder that uses only an Encrypted key to be extra safe. Besides the security feature, the latest version of Sync also gives it the ability to run as a service on Windows, as well as to move data to and from an SD card used by Android 5 devices and newer. Finally, if you’re on Linux, the update will allow you to only download files you’re missing instead of replicating whole folders. Source: BitTorrent Sync (1) , (2) 
An anonymous reader writes: Wine 1.8.0 is now the latest stable release of Wine Is Not An Emulator and available from WineHQ.org. Wine 1.8 features include support for DirectWrite, Direct2D support, very limited Direct3D 11 support, simple application support of DIrect3D 10, support for process jobs, 64-bit architecture support on OS X, networking updates, and over 13, 000 other individual changes. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
