At 04:01 PM 9/25/2003, John Conway wrote:
> Yes, of course. The same argument applies to
solving the game
of Chess. If next week
someone claims to have done that, I won't
believe them for the same reason, namely that the problem is so
big that their argument is more likely to be wrong than
right.
I think a computer search could succeed with the 4-D kissing number
problem. I was contemplating it several years ago. Consider
for a moment the 3-D version. Take a sphere to be the center
sphere. WOLG, place a sphere touching it. WOLG, place the
next sphere touching the center sphere and the first one,
etc. Use standard backtracking/depth first search. I
don't think there are too many possibilities to consider for the 4-D
kissing number - far fewer than chess.