On Wed, 16 Sep 1998, Dean-Christian Strik wrote:
> I disagree with you here. Aaron got his results illegally, but that doesn't
> make them less correct. I find it not morally justified to distinguish between
> legally and illegally obtained numbers. Hasn't science had many cases of
Actually, the way I read the argument it didn't talk about discarding any
knowledge aquired, but just his entry in the rankings to discourage
people from using questionable methods for aquiring the results. Whether
the actual results (of which there didn't seem to be much in this case?)
should be discarded is a whole another issue, where I'm definitely
favouring the no-approach.
> If, as you say, GIMPS will get 'unwarranted attention', i think this will only
> attract more 'home users' that'll join, and so speeding up the search. At
> companies, there will probably exist the tendency to stop (or: not start) the
Actually, I meant "unwanted attention". The kind of people it will
attract are people who don't intend to ask permissions. The message the
media is carrying is clear: "GIMPS and distributed netowrking are
hacker-havens which use software that slows your machine to a crawl". You
can only imagine what will come out of it if more people end up in
similiar situation trying to crank up their stats.
> Exactly. So what you are actually saying in your post, is that you think GIMPS
> shouldn't list illegally obtained numbers in the main list, but in the same
> post, you say GIMPS should. Sure...
I, unlike it seems many people, am capable of finding pros and cons from
multiple approaches to the same issue. Since there isn't one single
truth, it isn't even neccessary much less possible that I'd have the one
true answer handy. I recognize the need to discourage people from using
questionable means to gain fame here, but at the same time I speculate
adding subjectivity to the process would subtract from the attraction
many people feel towards the project. (And whether Aaron Blosser did
obtain those results "inappropriately" or not isn't really the issue
here, either, since even if he didn't, somebody is sooner or later going
to get caught from it. By that time, having the answer would be crucial.)
-Donwulff
