KritonK writes:
Ed's Note: For those not sure what an optimal Golomb ruler is, or how you would use one, see here.
"Following the recent start of the OGR-28 project, the search for the optimal Golomb ruler with 28 marks, distributed.net quietly announced the completion of project OGR-27 on February 25. The shortest Golomb ruler with 27 marks has length 553 and marks at positions 0 3 15 41 66 95 97 106 142 152 220 221 225 242 295 330 338 354 382 388 402 415 486 504 523 546 553. This confirms that the best known, up to now, Golomb ruler was optimal. When the project began, it was expected that a shorter ruler would be found, but this did not happen."
(Score: 5, Informative) by Barrabas on Sunday March 02 2014, @05:02PM
I was involved with this a looong time ago - right after the Scientific American article appeared in, let's see here, March 1972.
Back then we were happy to find rulers of length 12 (IIRC). It's a hard problem - there would be considerable interest if someone can come up with a better algorithm.
(Score: 1) by hubie on Sunday March 02 2014, @11:38PM
What is the general algorithm? If you are confirming it is optimal only by exhausting all the other configurations, it sounds like you need to brute-force it.