That's true and it was my first thought (which is why I asked about benchmarking the js code). What it did do was to get a pretty clever idea out into the world, which is to crowdsource the answer to some contest.

Contests are usually held to fire up peoples creativity and this idea to solve it via the browser as an ad-hoc cluster is really pretty creative.

Personally I think to try to solve this contest by brute forcing it is changing it in to a simple pissing contest between the various hardware / software combination, I'm sure some guy with an fpga kit will do a lot better than the CUDA competitors.

It would be nicer if someone discovered a previously undetected flaw and solved the contest through a backdoor. that would be hacker news :)