  We introduce a method for extracting the cusp anomalous dimension at L loops
from four-gluon amplitudes in N=4 Yang-Mills without evaluating any integrals
that depend on the kinematical invariants. We show that the anomalous dimension
only receives contributions from the obstructions introduced in hep-th/0601031.
We illustrate this method by extracting the two- and three-loop anomalous
dimensions analytically and the four-loop one numerically. The four-loop result
was recently guessed to be f^4 = - (4\zeta^3_2+24\zeta_2\zeta_4+50\zeta_6-
4(1+r)\zeta_3^2) with r=-2 using integrability and string theory arguments in
hep-th/0610251. Simultaneously, f^4 was computed numerically in hep-th/0610248
from the four-loop amplitude obtaining, with best precision at the symmetric
point s=t, r=-2.028(36). Our computation is manifestly s/t independent and
improves the precision to r=-2.00002(3), providing strong evidence in favor of
the conjecture. The improvement is possible due to a large reduction in the
number of contributing terms, as well as a reduction in the number of
integration variables in each term.
