What can you learn, in three years of computer time, about
an obscure problem in recreational mathematics? Not very
much, at least in this case. But hey, negative results
are still results, right? And still the Quest beckons to
your idle loop. In 1995, Tim
Irvin continued the Quest to two million digits.
His story
illustrates both how fast computers have gotten in the the last five years,
and how much of that power is often devoted to the idle loop.