>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 16:12:07 -0000 >Subject: Re: Mersenne: Category 1,2 or 3 ? > >Gordon Spence writes: > >>>>What bothers me most I guess is that the ordinary humble joe in the street >>>>being realistic has no chance whatever of finding the next mersenne prime. > >This is a slight exaggeration. If you're running LL tests or double-checks at all, >you've more chance than if you're not. True if I buy just one ticket I have a chance, but if you have 10,000 tickets me thinks you have a greatly improved chance (though still statistically improbable) [snip] > Therefore there is about 1 >chance in 100 that another Mersenne prime less than Spence's Number remains to be >found. I never actually worked out the figures, but something must have sunk in at some level of (un)consciousness, I have stopped doing any factoring work now (hardly get any 'credit' for doing it) and have turned over 6 machines to double checking leaving just 4 at LL testing. [snip] >1. Does anyone know where the estimate of an exponent yielding a Mersenne prime >that Prime95 outputs in its status pop-up comes from? (George, I can see & >understand th e source code, what I would like to know is the source of the >algorithm) Very good question, I often wondered that. BTW I am testing M20295673 at home. Apparent I have odds of about 161,000 to 1 that it is prime. > >2. Does our continued effort in eliminating possible Mersenne primes change that >estimate in any way? Since I joined the project 10 months ago, we have found no >new Mersenne primes (any day now?) but eliminated a great many exponents, >nevertheless the formula doesn't seem to have changed, which it probably should >have done if it's (even partly) based on empirical data. Intuition says that it should. But is this a variation on the old coin-tossing problem that is counter intuitive? regards G Gordon Spence, Nokia IP Telephony Applications Engineer Grove House, Waltham Way, [EMAIL PROTECTED] White Waltham, Maidenhead, http://www.nokiaiptel.com/ Berkshire, SL6 3TN, UK. ________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
