Re: M4 project

On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 18:29 +0000, Geoff Sullivan wrote:
> Surely if the
> >first walk failed, there's no point in doing it again? And certainly not
> >without changing the mid wheel ring.
> 
> [...] Hill-climbs
> don't come with a guarantee.
> 

I didn't notice any obvious way of changing the way the hillclimbing
started off. As you say, Stefan probebly knows what he's doing.


> >Presumably one of the optimisations in the system is to try only every 5
> >fast wheel ring positions on the grounds that you'll hillclimb OK even
> >if you slightly miss the correct ring position.
> 
> ...but if the plain-text is not as rich in high frequency trigrams as
> the above sample then skipping rings is very risky. Why bother with
> risks in a distributed computer project - plenty of processing
> available. Plenty of hungry clients out there, apparently.
> 

You might try them all eventually, but if you arrange to issue
work-units with the fast rings 5 characters apart to start with, there's
a good chance you'll hit a nearly-right solution earlier. You can always
go back and issue the inbetween ring positions afterwards if you're
having trouble.

-- 
Steve Hosgood <steve-0L79qhCdni9Wk0Htik3J/[email protected]>