Communications Technology

WASHINGTON. An international team of researchers using computer power from Google has found every way the popular Rubik’s cube puzzle can be solved, showing it can always be completed in 20 moves or less.

The research ends a 30-year search for the most efficient way to correctly align the 26 coloured cubes that make up Erno Rubik’s invention.

”It took 15 years after the introduction of the cube to find the first position that provably requires 20 moves to solve,” the team said. ”It is appropriate that 15 years after that, we prove that 20 moves suffice for all positions.” Using computers lent to them by Google, the team crunched through billions of cube positions, solving each one over a period of ”just a few weeks”.

The study builds on the work of a pantheon of Rubik’s cube researchers, starting with Morwen Thistlethwaite, who in 1981 showed 52 moves were sufficient to reach the solution from any given cube position.

By May 1992, Michael Reid showed 39 moves was always sufficient, only to be undercut a mere day later by Dik Winter, who showed 37 moves would work.

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Australia has not been asked to consider bringing criminal charges against the reclusive founder of the Wikileaks website for publishing classified documents about the Afghanistan war.

The US administration has accused Australian Julian Assange, the website’s editor-in-chief, of having blood on his hands.

The thousands of leaked documents contain information about the NATO-led military efforts in Afghanistan, and the names of Afghan informers.

The FBI is helping investigate the leak and the US has not ruled out a criminal investigation into Mr Assange.

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said the US administration had not asked him to consider pressing criminal charges against Mr Assange.

“I have not had representations made to me about the matters you refer to,” Mr Smith said in answer to a question at the National Press Club in Canberra where he was debating his opposition counterpart Julie Bishop on Thursday.

Nor had the US asked Australia to restrict Mr Assange’s passport.

Mr Smith criticised Wikileaks for publishing the documents, saying there were “very serious matters for concern”.

The leaks could affect Australian troops in Afghanistan, and Afghan citizens working alongside them.

Ms Bishop also condemned Wikileaks, saying Australia should contemplate all actions to avoid risks to its troops.

Defence has set up a taskforce to review what impact the leaked information may have on Australia’s national interest.

Mr Assange was born in Queensland and educated at the University of Melbourne. He now travels widely.

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One of the country’s fastest supercomputers will take up residence at WA’s Murdoch University later this year.

The $5 million Hewlett Packard supercomputer will be housed in its own temperature-controlled “Performance Optimised Datacentre”, a unit that looks similar to a shipping container from the outside, when it arrives at the university in October.

It is made up of a staggering 9600 central processing units and the machine will rival the cutting-edge machines used by internet giants such as Google.

It will be built in Sydney and the POD transported from Scotland, before the machine is brought to Perth to support the state’s $80 million Pawsey Centre, which was established last year to host high performance computing facilities and Square Kilometre Array research.

It is similar to supercomputers used by technology giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

When complete in 2013, the centre will rival the 20 best computers in the world and will allow Western Australia’s bid to be among a global network of Square Kilometre Array radio telescopes that will shed light on the birth and eventual death of the cosmos.

Murdoch University’s Director of the Centre for Comparative Genomics, Professor Matthew Bellgard, said the machine would be connected via a 10 gigabits-per-second network, have 500 terabytes of storage and have its own energy-efficient cooling system.

“The new supercomputer makes a quantum leap in terms of the speed at which researchers will be able to process data,” Professor Bellgard said.

It will be used to analyse data from scientists across the country working on radioastronomy, nanoscience, geoscience and life science projects.

“It’s really to support the increases in high-end scientific research from all areas that generate very large amounts of data,” Professor Bellgard said.

The supercomputer will be connected to the iVEC network, which consists of the CSIRO, Curtin University of Technology, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia.

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