On Mon, Jun 07, 1999 at 01:14:19AM -0700, Mersenne Digest wrote:
>I just noticed that the EFF is now offering $100,000 prize for the first
>10,000,000 digit prime. I assume that this means that they consider the
>1,000,000 digit prize essentially considered to have been claimed?
The $100,000 prize has been there all along, as somebody else pointed out.
However, somebody (can't remember who) complained that a 1,000,000,000
digit prime would not be found in a very, very long time. Heard that one
before? :-)
---snip---
>As someone else said, in the time it takes to find a giga-digit prime, why
>not throw a couple hundred bucks into a money market account or some other
>interest bearing fund...in the time it'd take to find a prime that big,
>you'd have already received that much in interest. :-)
Perhaps a gigadigit prime, but I think 10,000,000 should certainly be within
the limits. My poor PC is right now trying to find the first possible
10-million _exponent_... (Simple human-like algebra -- I'm sure all you
exagurus out there find a much better solution. For now, it _seems_ like
we get 3010 extra digits (possibly +1) for each 10000th iteration (of *2), but
that is of course pure guesswork. Extrapolating from that, we should get
an exponent of a little above 33 million, which is, believe it or not,
within reach. But perhaps I'm just too optimistic here, just as other people
tend to be pessimistic.)
---snip---
><div>+----------------------------------+</div>
><div>| Jud
>McCranie
>|</div>
><div>|
>|</div>
><div>| I have macular stars in my eyes. |</div>
><div>+----------------------------------+</div>
><br>
></html>
>
>- --=====================_233641312==_.ALT--
Again, general list stuff: Could somebody please make a HTML stripper? Anybody
with a more normal mail program can clearly see the problem here, I think...
>I wouldn't recommend the "> /dev/null" command. If you start it remotely,
>the stdout and stderr usually (but not always) go to e-mail. This way you
>can still see the output and not lose any critical messages...
mprime never closes stdout/stderr (unless terminated), so this e-mail will
never be sent :-) Better (IMHO) is using standard `nohup', because it sends
all output to a file called `nohup.out'.
More generally, perhaps we should make mprime ignore SIGHUP altogether, as
a standard? It only takes one line of code, namely:
signal(SIGHUP, SIG_IGN);
>I have heard some insider news that Intel *could* hit the 1 GigaHertz mark
>by years end if they had a reason too (if AMD jumped out with a unexpected
>surprise).
They probably could, but there is not enough market for such a chip yet, I
suppose. Those who really need that speed are buying non-Intel, and will
probably continue to do so for a while.
>Multiple processor systems are already becoming more mainstream.
You can say that again. Even the gamers (represented by id software) are
using SMP now! `Where go the gamers, so go the rest of the world.' (Picked
up on Slashdot.) This is a clear sign that it will be more normal very soon.
---snip---
>I also wonder how much Merced will affect coding practices. With it's EPIC
>architecture, programmers will have to rely on their wits more (the way they
>should be), hopefully getting tighter code. Of course, George already has
>his stuff about as efficient as you can get
Certainly not... Yes, true, it is extremely efficient, but it can still be
improved. (Some of this comes from Intel, who's got some real bad documentation
lying around.) When v19 comes out (it will be a while to, I believe), we will
not only get the promised 5% speedup (256K FFT, being lost in FFTs I don't
have a clue about what exponent that is), but George has also promised he
will do special optimization for P6 (PPro/PII/PIII), and wring even more
performance out of our systems...
BTW, coding for Merced will be something _entirely_ different than coding for
x86. And forcing programmers to `rely on their wits' really doesn't work, at
least it has never worked yet. A lot of programmers (including myself) spit
out extremely bad code at times.
---snip---
>[phma@littlecat bin]$ cat runtail
>#!/usr/bin/tclsh
If anybody are interested, I could convert this to a standard (ba)sh script.
---snip---
>Don't credit me with any great vision. I have repeatedly made boneheaded
>statements like "Our goal is to test all exponents below 1.3 million by
>the year 2000". Scott Kurowski and Luke Welsh have had much better vision.
Forgive me for my ignorance: the names George (Woltman) and Scott (Kurowski)
are well-known, but what does Luke (Welsh) do? Mailing-list operator? QA team
leader? I remember he's posted here, but I can't recall what his `official'
position is.
>(Heck, there's even a market still for 386 processors, they make darn good
>small office routers)
As you get P120s virtually for free, I don't think there's much money to
get for 386es now. But, of course, they are still usable (we picked up a
free 486 last year, and it's routing all it can), although not very much
as GIMPS machines.
---snip---
>However we can't deny having seen cash prizes, in addition to this satisfaction,
>make an observable difference in accelerating Mersenne number research results.
Can we? I'm sure you (Scott) is the one with most data on this...
/* Steinar */
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