Planetweb's value is in years of solving those programming challenges and in simple interface features like its pop-up magnifier, which lets surfers read text on their television screen from across the room.
Jonathan Schaeffer, the scientist who led the effort, said a breakthrough such as quantum computing would be needed before solving chess could even be attempted, but he does not rule out the possibility, saying that the one thing he learned from his 16-year effort of solving checkers "is to never underestimate the advances in technology".
Comparing year with year solves that problem but introduces another set of concerns, including timeliness.
Dr. Edwards, a physiologist who spent much of his career at Cambridge University in England, devoted more than 20 years to solving a series of problems in getting eggs and sperm to mature and unite successfully outside the body.
I have had many positive and valuable times during these years, ranging from the achievement of solving seemingly intractable experimental problems to the experience of attending major scientific meetings, but as a postdoc would these be sufficient to compensate for the lack of job security and the demanding hours of research?
And then there was the problem, which took Ms. Ellwood and Don Fleming, an audio expert, several more years to solve, of making sense of a jumble of seemingly random, disconnected reels and snippets where the audio track did not match what was taking place on screen.
"It's two years of puzzle solving," he said.
He also suggested that Mr. Vega, who was convicted in November on drug charges resulting from the same undercover operation, had been entrapped by the police who were eager to pin Officer Scheu's death on someone after so many years of not solving the crime.
For a few years after the murder, the police had hopes of solving it.
Campbell said he doubted the task force would make the necessary changes "because they had a number of years to solve their problems from within and have not been able to do so".
