Please - if you can, avoid quoting anything that doesn't directly pertain to
what you're responding to. Some people's posts have dozens of lines of
unnecessary quoting attached. This is an annoyance to (probably the very few)
those who use AOL and are forced to download an attachment when the digest
exceeds a certain size. Anyways:
<<As I said, unless there is an intervention or someone just takes it upon
themselves to double-check those exponents with software other than George's
(the very basis of doublechecking), we won't get confirmation of M37 until
2003>>>
We can doublecheck with Prime95 now, that's a new feature. But different
programs and systems are always a good idea.
I propose (for maybe not the first time) two new systems:
A) A doublechecking cleanup team of computers. A team of (say) five
PIII-500s, 64MB SRAM and suitable motherboards, with cheap everything else
(cases, etc, and probably only one old monitor to share among them all)
should be sent to work on the smallest exponents not doublechecked. I know
that we don't want to "poach" (good word) anyone's work, but exponents at the
VERY bottom of the list really *do* need to be finished. If the "owners" of
those exponents are annoyed, we can credit them for the CPU time they've
invested, or give them another exponent, etc. But the last dregs need to be
taken care of. The team of doublechecking cleanup computers should be pretty
small (I picked five) so that we don't poach too many exponents but still get
the work done.
B) A first-LL-testing cleanup team of computers. This should be even smaller.
One or two dedicated PIII-500s (and with the other characteristics I
mentioned) should be sent to work on the smallest exponents not
singlechecked. Again, we don't want to poach anyone's work, but oftentimes
anomalies crop up (a person who's forgotten about GIMPS and hardly ever turns
his computer on yet it occasionally reports from time to time, say) and
again, we need to finish exponents at the bottom of the list.
Of these two (probably not original) proposals, I consider the doublechecking
one the most important because the slowest computers are usually there. Of
course, these cleanup team(s) should be "offical" and given permission to do
this. Ah, if only I could build a team of LASTLYs. (LASTLY: A PII-400 I built
for the sole purpose of LL testing).
S.T.L.
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