http://agentsteal.dcmembers.com/
Optimal Solution Finder is a project that finds the best possible solutions for some simple games by trying all (or almost) possible combinations with the input at hand. As the website describes it
First things first... this is a NON-BOINC project guys. I know 90% of you reading this are now feeling disappointed, but the remaining 10% are happy that there are more non-boinc projects to choose from now.This project is using distributed computing to solve clones of The Incredible Machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine). These games have a very large number of possible solutions for each level. The project sifts through possible solutions, using the decompiled physics algorithms from each game. Possible solutions that are not solved after 1,000 frames are rejected. The goal of this project is to create walkthroughs with the games' optimal solutions. A solution is optimal if it uses the least number of objects required to win the level.
This seems to be a Windows only application, I have no idea if it is possible to run it on Linux through Wine.
You can see the stats following the link on the lower part of the website or here:
http://agentsteal.dcmembers.com/top10.php
There is no pretty screen saver, no graphics interface, and you don't see the application "playing the games", this is a pure command line application as you can see here:
The first time you run it, it will ask you for nickname and team name. To join AMD Users make sure you write it exactly as shown. Failing to write the team name correctly may lead it to create a new team with the misspelled name.
The application supports multi-core CPUs, by launching 1 command line window (worker thread) for each core of the cpu, so in a quad-core machine you'll see 4 of those windows up there. But you can for example close two of them and that way you'll only be using 50% of the quad-core on it.
And now some things to be careful with...
- You need an internet connection always available to fetch work. The application does not do buffering, it only works with 1 WU at a time.
- You need to have Java installed on the machine. If you don't it will complain at start.
- The application does not support resuming from last session, that is if you close it down and reopen again it starts the WU from scratch again.
- Also bad is that there is no progress bar or percentage, so it's impossible to know if the WU is nearly done or still in the beginning. The WU times are unpredictable, it can go from as little as half hour to over 8 hours.
- The application runs at a slightly higher level of priority than others, so it is more difficult to have it running along side with most projects because it will hog the cpu.
So, after all this, if you still want to run a good old non-boinc app, just download the and let it crunch away.
Our Team is World #1 here because the other teams seem to be sleeping, but we can always use all the help we can get to make sure we don't lose our spot.