>Best I could come up with ;-). I think that the best course of action would be
>to try and find numbers where the remainder actually does repeat (should any
exist.)
>When checking, we should consider exponents were all the remainders can be saved.
The size of saving all the exponent, in bits is ~n*(n-1), so keeping it <10MB, solve
the quadratic eq. n^2-n-10*8*1024*1024=0, so n is ~9159.
>
>Would anyone be willing to write the code to test this? (I would, but my programing
>skills are less than enough, I will however loan my CPU cycles)
I think we should check the math first. I have a sneaky suspicion that looping
won't occur in the relevant region (the first 2^n-3 iterations) unless n is
composite - which may be interesting, but doesn't help us eliminate Mersenne
numbers as candidate primes. But my math is inadequate to prove this 8-(
If no-one else can patch the math, then the brute force method may be
indicated, though (unless we start finding loops early) we could potentially
"waste" a lot of time looking for the unfindable.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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