The EFF of course, is offering the prize to help the advancement of just
this sort of distributed computing (well, in a simplified nutshell). I
don't think anyone should "profit" from GIMPS, but if we were to win a
huge prize, I think we should use the money as it's intended.
The idea of giving money for people who come up with speed improvements or
large contributions to prime theory is a good one, and certainly anyone
that incurrs expenses (Scott, George... anyone) should be reimbursed...
this is a small part of these prizes.
Here are a few other off the wall ideas... they should be taken
semi-seriously; more as an exercise in lateral thinking than anything
else.
Beyond giving out the money in our own way, we could use it to increase
GIMPs computing power in a few ways. If we started a non-profit
organization, we could buy our own server farms with the money... Hell, we
could double our speed right now by spending $50,000 on vanilla pentiums,
a room, and a huge electric bill. I bet a few people on the group would
volunteer time to keep it up. When the money runs out, donate the
computers to a school or something; even then, the money then becomes well
spent on continuing the computer industry, within parallel computing, and
within education; a worthy cause.
Or this... pay a computer manufacturer to subsidize computer sales to
academia with the requisite that the Prime95 (or similar) software is
installed ahead of time? Or just donate money to high-schools or colleges
to buy computers with the requisite that they help the GIMPs project?
Again, everyone wins, and noone feels greedy.
OR... we could fund the production of sieving/LL testing hardware. I'd
like to see a four inch square cube sitting on my desk running factor.exe
all day. :-)
Advertise... could you imagine advertisements for GIMPs in the Wall Street
Journal? :-) Or a good spot on Cartoon Network or the Sci Fi Channel.
Have a party... wouldn't YOU like to meet the other people working with
GIMPS? Frankly, this wouldn't be THAT expensive, and we could even make
it a symposium or something.... call for papers or research in the area of
computational number theory.
I could go on... but I imagine this is long enough, and people probably
won't make it much further.
Just some ideas. I admit, tho, that although I'm not completely sure what
happend to the current prize money, everyone on the project should at
least have a vote or a word in a discussion about what happens to it.
Later,
---Chip
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(o o)
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| Chip Lynch | Computer Guru |
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] | |
| (703) 465-4176 (w) | (202) 362-7978 (h) |
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