When a machine is assigned "factoring" is that what it's doing? Or are they
trying to find as many factors for known composite as they can? I was
wondering how laborious preliminary testing for exponents are. As exponents
get bigger and as current computer in GIMPS outlive their usefulness, higher
exponents can be sieved somehow up to say the the millionth prime...
Just a thought.
-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Blosser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Mersenne@Base. Com <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sunday, May 16, 1999 7:41 PM
Subject: RE: Mersenne: Rather naive question
> From: Jiho Kim
> Subject: Mersenne: Rather naive question
>
> How exactly are the exponents to be tested chosen? It must be prime, of
> course, and so do we just test all prime exponents? Or is there a further
> effort that GIMPS makes to weed out mersenne composites with prime
> exponents?
Good question. Primenet itself gets an allocation of exponents to check out
every time Scott and George do a database synchronization. To my knowledge,
George keeps the best track of what exponents have and have not been tested
as part of the GIMPS project. I'm not sure how many other non-GIMPS folks
are doing testing, but I'd hope that they work with George on who is testing
what exponents.
As for weeding out, basically it's just the trial-factoring. Each exponent
is trial-factored up to a certain bit size (based on the size of the
exponent) to eliminate (relatively) small factors. If a factor is found,
it's obviously not tested with the LL test.
Other than that, they all have to be looked at.
________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
