
List of Unsolved Scientific Problems with Large Monetary Prizes - pancero
http://scienceprizes.org/
======
Jun8
No need to be hopeless about winning one of these! The "easiest" ones to
target, I think for the general HN crowd, will be the EFF Cooperative
Computing Awards, i.e. finding primes with 100 million and a billion digits.
Looking at the winning claim from 2009
([https://www.eff.org/awards/coop/primeclaim-43112609](https://www.eff.org/awards/coop/primeclaim-43112609)),
which was a Mersenne prime with 12M+ digits, I see that it was discovered
using an "Dell Optiplex 745 computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
running at 2.4 GHz" running for about 33 days. Netting the 100M prime should
be doable using, e.g. a couple hundred EC2 instances for a couple of weeks.

With current EC2 prices
([http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/)) ,
for $100k one can run a c4.8xlarge instance (36 cores) for 2244 days, so for a
comparable time for the 2009 award, you can run (2244/33)x36=2448 cores rather
than two. Assuming that's adequate to discover the 100M digit prime, that's a
net profit of $50k!

Since no body has done this there must be some significant flaws in the naive
analysis above. What are they? What is a rough estimate of how fast the
computational load would go up from 10M to 100M to 1B digit prime search?

~~~
ac29
I think you misread how the previous prime was found:

"4D. The Lucas-Lehmer test began on Sun Jul 20 12:33:46 2008 PDT and concluded
on Sat Aug 23 00:29:27 2008 PDT. That's a total of 33 1/2 days. The Dell
Optiplex was the only computer used to initially prove this candidate prime.
However, the computer was part of GIMPS' "PrimeNet" network of roughly 75,000
computers testing other Mersenne number candidates."

It didnt take one computer 33 days, it took 75,000 computers searching
simultaneously to find a prime.

edit: The next largest prime, at 17 million digits, took a further 5 years of
searching on a network that has over 100 TFLOP/s of compute power [1].

[1] [http://www.mersenne.org/primes/](http://www.mersenne.org/primes/)

~~~
throwaway86321
The choice of a Dell Optiplex business desktop PC for a month-long calculation
in 2008 is interesting for historical reasons.

A decade before that, Sun workstations that cost $30k each were used for long-
running engineering tests like chip verification, while an Optiplex is less
than 10% of that.

~~~
dekhn
Well, in 1998, I was running a dual-processor Dell Optiplex at 400MHz for
month-long simulations; it cost $5000 at the time. but yeah, most people
around me were buying $25k SGIs that had about half the oomph of my machine. I
think that was the year it became clear Intel was going to get enough floating
point and cache to be competitive with the RISC UNIX systems.

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tmuir
The commercial value of the solutions to some of these problems are multiple
orders of magnitude higher than the prize money.

In that sense, the prize money isn't really much incentive to develop a
Tricorder, or a process to remove greenhouse gases.

~~~
nostalgiac
If the prize was higher then the cost of the solution - then there would
likely be no prize (and they would simply spend the money on developing that
solution).

The prize money shouldn't be the incentive for these solutions, more of a by-
product.

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reasonattlm
The list is missing the Mprize for mouse longevity, which is still out there,
and the Palo Alto Prize for rejuvenation treatments in mammals. Possibly
others as well.

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gpickett00
They should make it so that people can donate to the prize of their choice to
increase the size of the prize. Shouldn't we try to drive the prize $ up in
order to create more of an incentive to solve each of these challenges?

~~~
plesiv
Having non-profit collecting crowd-funds for the solutions to the important
scientific problems would be great. But I would imagine that for those most
capable of solving these problems prizes are _not essential_ , while grants
that would allow them to conduct the research in the first place _are_.

So... Create capable non-profit with goal of crowd-funding important research.

~~~
derefr
The key innovation would be an investor (venture capitalist?) willing to give
out grants themselves, in return for a share of the resulting X-prizes. Then
funding the prizes would, through Market Magic™, produce grants.

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sdenton4
Luckily, KSP1.0 recently came out to help us with prototyping for the Lunar
XPrize.

~~~
gizmo686
I wouldn't call the Lunar XPrize an unsolved problem. We have already landed
manned vessels on the moon, and have landed and operated rovers on other
celestial bodies. The issue is more that we do not care enough to land a rover
on the moon.

Of course, if you interpret the challenge as doing it withing a budget of
$20,000,000, then it becomes a much more interesting challenge.

~~~
sdenton4
Hmmmmmmm..... I wonder what you could get away with if you're ok with having a
stupidly low-mass rover, say with the mass of a go-pro.

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gedrap
>>> Create free Android apps to spread reading, writing, and arithmetic
skills, and prove their effectiveness over an 18-month period in African pilot
communities.

5 prizes of $1M and a grand prize of $10M. That seems quite viable for the HN
crowd. However, this is rather subjective compared to other problems. Many
other problems are more like true/false.

Still, that's quite interesting and an app, designed for learning, with heavy
optimizations on UX seems like a very commercially viable product. Given you
have to do the skills of enterprise sales :)

~~~
ximeng
"Registration closed" on that website

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ggchappell
This is an interesting mix.

> Google Lunar XPRIZE $20,000,000 Successfully launch, land, and operate a
> rover on the lunar surface.

That almost reads like a joke. It's going to take an awful lot more than
$20,000,000 to accomplish that. The prize money is nearly irrelevant.

> ALS Treatment Prize $1,000,000 Develop a therapy that extends the life of
> ALS mice by 25%.

I surprised this one hasn't been taken yet.

~~~
ohitsdom
The Google Lunar XPRIZE already has a bunch of teams making decent progress.
The $30 million[0] certainly won't fund the whole trip, but it seems to be a
big enough supplement that it is encouraging institutions to give it a serious
effort.

That being said, I would love to see the competition and effort if the prize
was increased by a factor of at least 25.

[0] [http://lunar.xprize.org/](http://lunar.xprize.org/)

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piptastic
I looked through 2 of these that looked the most interesting to me, and the
registration is closed.

Need a way to filter the list to things that you can still register to enter.

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wfunction
Or just build a photo sharing app called Instagram, worth $1 billion.

~~~
guelo
Yea but out of hundreds of photo sharing apps only one was worth $1 billion.

~~~
bnegreve
Well, the odds of finding a prime number with 1,000,000,000 digts are lower by
far and you only get $250,000

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zerooneinfinity
I'm surprised SpaceX doesn't go for the Lunar prize.

~~~
greglindahl
The current plan [1] is for several teams to pool their money and launch
together on a SpaceX rocket. Once they arrive together on the lunar surface,
then they'll race to see who wins the prize. SpaceX will be paid their normal
launch fee.

[1] [http://lunar.xprize.org/press-release/two-google-lunar-
xpriz...](http://lunar.xprize.org/press-release/two-google-lunar-xprize-teams-
announce-rideshare-partnership-mission-moon-2016)

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lqdc13
The P vs NP one looks undoable compared to the other ones.

~~~
mherrmann
Why?

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dtparr
I'd explain, but it'd be exponentially long and boring. Or maybe not. I can
never be sure.

~~~
yen223
Do let us know when you find the answer. We can check it quickly.

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yitchelle
1\. Get a infinite number of monkeys into a room

2\. Give it one of these problems.

3\. Profit!, of course minus the cost of the bananas.

~~~
dagw
You forgot step 2.5. Find the scrap of paper with the correct proof on it
among the infinite scraps of paper without the correct proof on it.

~~~
MikeTV
No need -- just submit them all!

~~~
dagw
Submit 'em all. Let peer review sort 'em out.

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kaeluka
Any low-hanging fruits? ;)

