what's most interesting to me about this research is that it is an online collaborative one. I wonder how many more project such as this there are, and if it could be more widespread, maybe as a platform.
For example:
The original cryptographic challenges like the DES challenge and the RSA challenges had a goal to demonstrate something about the strength of cryptosystems (roughly, that DES and, a fortiori, 40-bit "export" ciphers were pretty bad, and that RSA-1024 or RSA-2048 were pretty good). The EFF Cooperative Computing Award had a further goal -- from the 1990s -- to show that Internet collaboration is powerful and useful.
Today I would say that all of these things have outlived their original goals, because the strength of DES, 40-bit ciphers, or RSA moduli are now relatively apparent; we can get better data about the cost of brute-force cryptanalytic attacks from the Bitcoin network hashrate (which obviously didn't exist at all in the 1990s), and the power and effectiveness of Internet collaboration, including among people who don't know each other offline and don't have any prior affiliation, has, um, been demonstrated very strongly over and over and over again. (It might be hard to appreciate nowadays how at one time some people dismissed the Internet as potentially not that important.)
This Busy Beaver collaboration and Terence Tao's equational theories project (also cited in this paper) show that Internet collaboration among far-flung strangers for substantive mathematics research, not just brute force computation, is also a reality (specifically now including formalized, machine-checked proofs).
There's still a phenomenon of "grid computing" (often with volunteer resources), working on a whole bunch of computational tasks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grid_computing_project...
It's really just the specific "establish the empirical strength of cryptosystems" and "show that the Internet is useful and important" 1990s goals that are kind of done by this point. :-)
- https://conwaylife.com/, on Conway's GoL and other cellular automata
- Googology, https://googology.fandom.com/wiki/Googology_Wiki and https://googology.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page, on big numbers