Golomb ruler

One practical use of Golomb rulers is in the design of phased array radio antennae such as radio telescopes. Antennae in an [0,1,4,6] Golomb ruler configuration can often be seen at cell sites[?].

The shortest Golomb rulers with a given number of points are referred to as optimal Golomb rulers.

distributed.net[?] is currently (2002) running a distributed massively parallel[?] search for optimal Golomb rulers.

Examples of Golomb rulers

• [0,1,3] optimal
• [0,1,3,7] not optimal
• [0,1,4,6] optimal
• [1,2,4,8,16,..(powers of 2)..] not optimal

References:

• Martin Gardner, "Mathematical games", Scientific American, March 1972, p. 108-112

External links:

• http://www.research.ibm.com/people/s/shearer/grule
• http://www.distributed.net/ogr/